


The Crane Wife

by x_los



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Office, Consent Issues, M/M, Non-Sexual Slavery, Sexual Slavery, Slavery, Trope Subversion/Inversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-04
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 23:57:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 68,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/615806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor, a half-human renegade Time Lord who's never so much as set foot on his father's home world, has had a really rotten day. As if dying weren't bad enough, now he's facing the auction block. The renegade Time Lord Emperor of Hestin makes an ill-starred impulse buy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Title: The Crane Wife  
Chapter: One:Seven  
Author: [](http://x-los.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://x-los.livejournal.com/)**x_los**  
Rating: R  
Pairing: Five/Ainley!Master  
Summary: The Doctor, a half-human renegade Time Lord who's never so much as set foot on his father's home world, has had a really rotten day. As if dying weren't bad enough, now he's facing the auction block. The renegade Time Lord Emperor of Hestin makes an ill-starred impulse buy.  
Beta: [](http://aralias.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://aralias.livejournal.com/)**aralias** , who this is, as a great many things are, also for.  
A/N: Remember that [](http://best-enemies.livejournal.com/profile)[**best_enemies**](http://best-enemies.livejournal.com/) Cliche Challenge forever ago? This was started under its auspices. **Slave!fic cliche ahoy!**

 

 

The Crane Wife  
Chapter 1

_Sound the keening bell,_  
And see it's painted red.  
Soft as fontenelle—  
The feathers in the thread.  
And all I ever meant to do was to keep you,  
My crane wife. 

—The Crane Wife No. 2, The Decemberists

 

 

“Are not the lines—by which I mean to suggest, the entire _form_ —the very illustration of grace, my Lord?” The Thane of Glispywallop rapped his thin, ring-encrusted knuckles on the wood enthusiastically. The resulting metallic jangle made the Master’s jaw clench involuntarily. His ears were already over-taxed—the Thane had a voice like lumpy gravy that wanted sieving.

“The _quintessence_ of elegance, Thane.” The Master’s lip quirked in private amusement. “And you have no any idea where it’s from.”

“No idea whatsoever,” the Thane admitted cheerfully. “The object was discovered in the marketplace this morning. Serendipity itself! Found art, my Lord! We have been calling it ‘Police Public Call Box,’ but perhaps ‘Untitled in wood and chipping paint’ would suit it better—it sounds so _common_ , so much more approachable.”

“Indeed, Thane. One could never accuse you of pretension.”

Whatever it had chosen to disguise itself as, to the Master it was obvious that this ‘Police Public Call Box’ was a TARDIS of some description. It had made itself conspicuous to the populace by stubbornly remaining in a shape akin to nothing the Glispywallopians had seen before. Possibly its chameleon circuit was faulty. But what could a (possibly) broken TARDIS possibly be doing on _Glispywallop,_ of all the wretched corners of the galaxy? Obviously the TARDIS’s pilot was still alive somewhere: if he weren’t his TARDIS would have departed for the graveyard of its kind, where the ships sang and screamed their loss to one another in static cackles and sizzling electric whimpers, rather than let itself be collected and exhibited by a dilettante art critic. The TARDIS _could_ belong to another renegade, someone hiding out here on the fringes of his empire. Or perhaps it was the property of a CIA agent who’d come out to the spatial-temporal boondocks expressly to gather intelligence on him. The High Council conventionally took a laissez faire approach to his project, but the possibility still bore investigation.

“I wonder if you might be persuaded to part with the object.” The Master laid a palm on the wooden door. He felt swirling sentience stir beneath the grain in answer to his touch.

The large blue box was entirely incongruous in the Thane’s overly dainty salon. Really in taking it off his hands the Master would be saving him from a grave error of taste. People, the Master often felt, should thank him for using his good sense on their behalf, especially as most of them seemed to him to lack any of their own. The Thane, however, typically ungrateful, looked like a sulky dog deprived of a treat.

“I could hardly _deny_ such a long-standing and important trading partner as _yourself_ , my Lord Master—” The Thane cleared his throat and smiled hesitatingly. Someone of a more charitable disposition than the Master might have thought to call his manner coy, but even the very polite would have held the word in reserve for use in the description of someone more self-assured and significantly more fetching. “But isn’t there anything else—”

“Excellent.” The Master smiled toothily at him. “I’m delighted you elected to give me such a satisfactory present. I will take possession of it after our tour of your new commercial sector.”

The Thane of Glispywallop coddled his wounded dignity, reminding himself that his ancestors had been kings. They had conquered the dells of this land back when it was a wild place, and its name altogether harder to pronounce, with a great many more silent ‘t’s’ in the spelling. Likewise he reminded himself that the Master’s imperial treasury housed a truly obscene amount of money, trickling rivulets of which kept him in exciting new rings.

The Thane swallowed and gave his nearly-coy smile one last old college try. The warbling grin failed its classes, drunkenly lost its virginity to an uncaring cad, and slinked back home to the small corners of the Thane’s mouth in defeat. The heir of the ancient line of Glispywallop signed and resigned himself to acting as the Master’s delivery boy. “Shall I have it delivered to your craft, sir?”

“Oh no, that won’t be necessary,” the Master said. He planned to materialize around the stray TARDIS and carry it back, nestled within his own TARDIS like a matryoshka doll. The Master gave a sharp smile at the bewildered look on Glispywallop’s face. “I have my own methods, Thane.” What he didn’t have was any interest in explaining the techniques in question to a man with all the scientific acuity of a goldfish. “And I’m afraid my time is not infinite—shall we see how your people are getting along?”

The economic wellbeing of Glispiwallop, like that of all the planets that bordered his own empire, was a subject of no small concern to the Master. Failing economies bred dissent, and unstable environments were ripe breeding grounds and safe harbors for terrorist cells. These tended to be, not altogether unsurprisingly, unsympathetic to the Master’s regime. That was the trouble with running an empire: it didn’t take much in the way of training, intelligence or resources to attack such a large target, just a lack of anything better to do at the moment. The Master had invested generously in development projects that he hoped would keep this economy strong, the political situation stable, and the people of Glispywallop as deferential as their Thane.

He thought it prudent to check in occasionally to see that his money, and thus his far-flung sphere of influence, was being competently managed. It wouldn’t do at all for the local strongmen he supported to leave their underlings to starve and plot while the Master’s back was turned. Fortunately the Thane had too little imagination to be a truly bad man. He bought himself a few extra baubles with the Master’s stipend, but he didn’t really know what to do with any more of it. The Thane turned the rest over to his burghers, and the burghers had apparently decided it was high time Glispywallop develop its ancient market into something respectable.

The Thane held up a shiny hand—he favored gestures that emphasized the day’s carefully chosen combination of accessories. “Naturally Master. You’re a busy man, I quite understand.” This seemed to imply he, himself, was A Busy Man, and sympathized with the Master’s struggles.

The Master arched a cutting eyebrow at any such comparison, but let it pass. “No rest for the wicked,” he sighed self-indulgently, drawing on his black traveling cloak.

***

The Doctor’s day was going poorly. If he’d been asked to rate it on a scale of one to ten, if he’d been able to stay conscious long enough to comprehend the question, he’d have given it a solid negative eleven.

He’d died, for one, which was always enormously inconvenient. After that he’d crawled into his TARDIS to regenerate (good), but then he’d accidentally set the damn thing in flight and ended up at what looked to be, but probably was significantly more sinister than, a Renaissance Faire (bad). He’d staggered outside and remembered to lock the door behind him before slumping down against the TARDIS’s side (good, except for the undignified slump, which was probably very bad for his still-developing new regeneration’s posture). Passers-by offered him medical attention (and while he didn’t _actually_ need a cold compress and a hot cup of something very like tea to help him through the agonies of regeneration sickness, it was still: very good!).

Unfortunately, it turned out they had only been so generous with their healthcare because they wanted to ginger him up and sell him into slavery. Apparently it was market day, and the slavers were trying to round up a particularly sizable amount of merchandise to impress some visiting dignitary. The prospect of being sold as chattel at auction was too vile to be safely ensconced in parentheses. This was all very bad indeed.

Still, the Doctor reflected brightly as he was dragged, squinting, into the sun, emerging from the covered wagon only to be plunged back into what looked very much like a holding tent, at least he’d found the time during his feverish regeneration trauma to change into these jaunty cricketing whites.

***

“The public auction is the highlight of the trade fair. The magic of commerce has already united cows with dairy merchants, thread with the ladies of the seamstresses' guild, lonely entrepreneurs far from home with the ladies and various assorted representatives of the _other_ seamstress’s guild, and bric-à-brac with whoever it is that actually has a use for bric-à-brac. It sells quite well every fair, so I’ve always supposed there must be someone. Never gotten around to asking what they actually _do_ with the stuff, though.”

The Master had to admit that the elected leader of the Council of Burghers gave an efficient tour. The man seemed aware that what was essentially an agricultural fair held little to no inherent interest for a technologically advanced off-worlder. The Council leader seemed to be actively trying to make this thinly-veiled inspection as painless as possible.

“The auction traditionally culminates in an offering of slaves.” The Burgher stopped at a large, smelly orange-red tent. He lifted up the flap for the Master to pass through ahead of him and looked back quizzically when the Master didn’t take him up on the invitation. “A problem, my lord?”

“I dislike slavery, Burgher Swivvy. It’s an inefficient economic system, and it inevitably breeds slave revolts, which fracture polities and destabilize whole regions. If I were the sort of man who indulged in morals I imagine I would find them affronted by such a tawdry public display of money being exchanged for sentient beings. Though I am not that sort of man, I find I’ve little interest in being shown around your reeking slave pens.”

“It _is_ cultural, sir,” the Burgher rebuked his guest. The slave auction was the highlight of the fair. Burgher Swivvy couldn’t quite believe even an off-worlder could fail to appreciate that. He glanced around them at the various tradesmen loitering about waiting for the sale to begin and lowered his voice. “If people see you turn your nose up at the pens without even going in, they’ll think you know something they don’t. Within the hour they’ll all be telling each other that this whole lot’s rubbish. Traders won’t bid fair value for the goods, and the most profitable day of the year will be spoilt. _Please,_ sir. Perhaps you’d submit to a tour of the merchandise before it goes on the block? It would be your special privilege, my Lord. A sneak peak?” Burgher Swivvy played to the Master’s (admittedly rather justified) sense of his own importance. With an aggrieved roll of his eyes the Master indulged his guide and entered.

“You!” A young blonde man in the first pen, who was sitting in a lump of straw and wearing clothing as out of place as it was anachronistic, pointed at the Master. “I know you, don’t I? Ah, no,” the young man corrected himself, “no, no, I’m sorry, I’m _going_ to know you. I seem to be confusing the two today.” He quirked his head and squinted up at the Master. “You’re a good deal taller than you should be.”

“My height is much as ever it is,” the Master corrected the stranger, amused. _You,_ however, are crouching in a bed of hay. It’s possible this isn’t a position you’re much accustomed to, which might account for your altered perspective.”

“Am I really?” The blonde man looked about him with an air of surprise and discovery, “am I indeed—ah, I see, yes. This is, indisputably, a bed of hay. Well. I’m the Doctor—” the man stood and swayed dramatically, catching himself on a tent pole with a last-second dive. This worked for a moment. He let go of the pole, very cautiously, and promptly pitched forward, careening dangerously at the Master, who had to catch the projectile stranger in his arms to keep from being bowled over. “You know you’re quite comfortable, actually,” the Doctor said, voice muffled because his mouth was pressed up against the fabric of the Master’s shoulder. “Are you wearing velvet? I don’t think I’ll be doing that this time around—it's difficult to clean, for one.”

“Tell me, are you suffering from regeneration sickness, Doctor?” The Master laid his leather gloved fingers against both fluttering pulse points in the man’s neck, then carefully pushed the other Gallifreyan back against the handy tent pole.

“Certainly not,” the Doctor, all hectic complexion and wild eyes, scanned the room for an escape. He made a feeble break for the door. The Master caught him with one hand and again guided him back to the pole.

“Only those Time Lord fellows get that,” the Doctor continued as if he hadn’t just tried to flop feebly off to freedom. “I, on the other hand, have a virulent case of Venusian bird flu. If I’m not released it’ll spread to everyone here, so you really should let me go. Please. Aside from that I’m perfectly alright.” The Doctor’s sulky defense had gotten quieter as it continued, and now he appeared to have fallen asleep against the wood support.

“You can’t want much for this one,” the Master said casually to Burgher Swivvy. “He’s raving mad and violently ill. He seems likely to fall off the stand and topple into the crowd at auction. I’d spare your auctioneer the trouble of presenting him and give you fifty drachbars for him now.”

“I’d hazard a guess we’d get a good deal more than that for him at an open auction,” Swivvy scoffed. “He’s rather pretty, if mentally negligent—but then in my experience no one’s ever yet bought a bedroom slave because they were attracted to his loquacious sanity.”

“I’ll give you seventy five, then,” the Master pressed, and then, when Swivvy opened his mouth to protest, “and I’ll throw in a reminder that I am your honored guest—one who has allowed himself to be persuaded to observe your repellent cultural traditions, Burgher.”

“Ah. Quite right, my Lord.” Swivvy smiled nervously. “Of course. If you like him, he’s yours for seventy five. Droit du seigneur and all that.”

***

When the Doctor woke up, he saw a woman in an unfamiliar uniform who was nonetheless unmistakably a nurse. She clucked sympathetically at him.

“There’s a love, you just drink some of the water on the bedside there. I’ll fetch you your soup. You can handle the pitcher? ‘Course you can.” She turned to the wall com. “Yer, would you tell his Lordship that the patient’s awake? Ta.” She turned back to the Doctor as if he’d been eagerly awaiting her news rather than rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “He’ll be with us in a moment then, dearie.”

“Excuse me, but may I ask who exactly will be?” The Doctor sat up with a slight wince. His muscles were dull from the lack of use occasioned by bed rest, but otherwise he felt hale and rested, as if he’d slept off his regeneration sickness entirely. Which was odd. Here he was in some hospital or other, but he felt sure he remembered having been at a fair of some kind.

“Who? Lord, you were out of it!” The woman shook her head in bemusement at him, but before she could refresh his memory the door was opening to admit a bearded man. The nurse nodded to him very deferentially and slid around him and out the door.

“The Doctor, was it?” The man settled in the chair the nurse had abandoned. He had a peculiarly penetrating, intense gaze. The Doctor stifled the impulse to squirm under it.

“You have me at a disadvantage, I’m afraid.” He gave the Master a small smile. The slight tilt of the head this involved caused a shock of blond hair to flop forward into his face. Annoyed, the Doctor brushed it aside. His last head of hair hadn’t given him this sort of trouble, or been nearly as likely to keep him from being taken seriously. Still, this was the sort of thing one had to adjust to with a new regeneration. At least this time he didn’t feel the slightest urge to take up a new musical instrument. “If it’s not too terribly cliché, could we go through the traditional questions?”

“Ah.” The other man had what seemed to be an almost-perpetual warm smirk. “I trust you refer to ‘where am I?’ ‘Who are you?’”

“The classics,” the Doctor agreed, “beloved of those recently restored to consciousness the universe over.”

“Mm. Well, in observance of tradition, Doctor,” he leaned back and gestured at the room around them, “you’re in the Imperial Palace on Hestin Prime. You occupy a portion thereof that I have had converted from an old Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution Venue into additional living quarters, if you care to know. And if you’re attempting to identify a certain disquieting sensation of familiarity, it may help you to know that I am, like yourself, a Time Lord.”

“Ah,” the Doctor’s eyes flared with recognition. “Hestin Prime—you must be the Master. I know you by reputation, of course. This does save me the trouble of wondering whether you’re a CIA operative.”

“Is that something you wonder frequently?”

“If I ever ran into other Time Lords, then yes, I imagine it certainly would be. As it’s never happened before, I’ve never yet had cause to.”

The Master arched an eyebrow. “You’ve never met another Time Lord, and yet you claim to be one yourself?”

“Well, no—I _have_ met my father.” The Master’s absolutely blank look made the Doctor draw a weary breath. “I’ll explain later.”

“Explain now, Doctor,” the Master corrected him. “Or do you have some urgent luncheon engagement?”

The Doctor opened his mouth, began to say something, paused with a glare because no one ever actually called him on that, and then obliged the Master. “My father was, well, something of a renegade. He took a TARDIS out on a routine scientific mission, faked his own demise in the Medusa Cascade—which, I’m told, happened often enough back then so as not to have been particularly suspicious—and retired to a quiet life on an inconspicuous M-class planet in the Milky Way galaxy sometime in the Rassilonate era. He certainly hadn’t planned to, but he ended up marrying a local woman.

“I’m the product of that marriage. When I reached a certain age my father told me the whole truth about the world he’d left. He offered to send me to live with relatives there, even though he’d have to expose himself as a renegade to do so. I appreciated my father’s reasons for leaving, however. And naturally I didn’t want to inconvenience my family. I asked that he educate me himself on Earth instead. Other than making a brief visit to an orbital space hanger for disused TARDISes to,” the Doctor coughed, “ _collect_ my Type 40, I’ve been nowhere near the planet. I’ve never so much as been introduced to another Gallifreyan. Until now, of course.” He smiled at the Master, boyish and charming. “Delighted to make your acquaintance.”

“Likewise.” The Master grinned. “You know, Doctor, your origins are extraordinary—I’ve never met a Time Lord born or reared outside the Citadel.” The Master leaned back, watching the Doctor over his laced fingers. “And I suppose the CIA doesn’t even track you as a renegade—”

“Because they’ve no idea I exist? That’s right,” the Doctor agreed briskly, then changed the subject. “I’m incredibly obliged to you for rescuing me from that auction. I could never have made a respectable servant. I’d only have been blackballed in the Junior Ganymede ballot, and I don’t know whether I could have borne the snub.”

The Master waved a dismissive hand, not wanting to admit to not having understood what had sounded like a joke. “Not at all, Doctor.”

“I don’t suppose you know what became of my TARDIS?” The Doctor gave him a hopeful look. “It would have been large, blue and wooden at the time—at any time, actually. The chameleon circuit’s broken, I’ve been meaning to fix it. Reads ‘Police Public Call Box’ across the top?” The Doctor’s expression was genuine, endearingly earnest. The Master was almost tempted to tell him the truth.

“There’s no trace of a TARDIS anywhere on the revolting world I found you on,” he said, which wasn’t strictly a lie: the Doctor’s TARDIS wasn’t anywhere near Glispywallop, now. It was still inside the Master’s, the location of which, when he wasn’t using it, was a matter of Imperial state secret. The Master always wanted her somewhere discrete, well-protected and yet close at hand in case of emergencies. The capsule was currently disguised as his bedroom closet. If one pushed past the dark, plush capes and jackets and they’d find, to their great surprise, a sleek console room, vast and otherworldly.

“Oh.” The Doctor’s eyes (blue, the Master observed almost without noticing he did it, very blue indeed—a striking—what would you call that? Wedgwood? No, he corrected himself, they were darker than that—more of a cobalt shade) dropped in disappointment. Then, with some decision, the Doctor slung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. “The poor girl must have wandered off. She does that from time to time—getting on in years, you see. Well. I must be off. I’ve a TARDIS to find. Thank you very much for—”

“Off, Doctor?” the Master inquired politely, lazy in his low chair. He should have moved his legs to let the Doctor pass, but he didn’t.

The Doctor frowned at him. “As I said, I’m delighted to have been saved from slavery—”

“Ah,” the Master arched an eyebrow. “I see. You do not understand your position, Doctor. I’ve _bought_ you.”

“ _Excuse me?_ ” The Doctor goggled at him. “You’ve _bought_ me?”

“For seventy five drachbars. You’re now mine to do with as I please.” The Master chuckled. “You have been somewhat naïve, haven’t you?”

“Seventy five drachbars? What’s that, roughly the price of a _small wagon?_ ” The Doctor’s voice had gone squeaky with indignation. Not that it was important, but he might’ve hoped to be thought worth at least as much as a cottage or something. The Doctor swallowed, eyes widening slightly. “And what _exactly_ am I supposed to be doing to earn my keep?”

The Master, of whom he’d heard nothing but the most appalling rumors, had a tight, vicious smile. It seemed a product of unfathomable sources of private amusement. Something in it made the Doctor’s breath catch in his throat, his stomach tighten. “Tell me, Doctor,” the Master eyed him up and down, his gaze frank and infuriatingly proprietary, “how are you in the laboratory?”

It wasn’t quite the question the Doctor expected. His eyes narrowed. “If it’s about the money, I assure you, I can buy my liberty—”

“Oh, I’m far more interested in your mind than your monetary resources, Doctor.” People generally find declarations that someone isn’t just in their bedroom because they’re after money flattering, but, difficult as ever, the Doctor only winced. “Besides,” the Master smirked, “what else can one really accomplish with seventy five drachbars? I’m not currently in the market for a wagon, small or otherwise.”

“Master,” the Doctor sat down on the bed again, facing the other man at eye level. “We’re both Time Lords. From what I know of our people, we’re culturally far beyond this nonsense. Surely there’s some way to convince you to be _reasonable_ about this situation?”

The Master interlaced his fingers in his lap. “I’m being entirely reasonable,” he said coolly. “I’ve acquired another Time Lord to work under me at bargain price. Surely it would be _unreasonable_ of me to throw back such a catch. And I must warn you, Doctor, I won’t tolerate a poor performance from you. Any attempt to sabotage my work through mediocrity will be met with the direst consequences.”

The Doctor gaped at him, managing simultaneous incredulity, righteous indignation and rage. Splashes of red stood out on his fever-pale cheeks, striking as wine stains on a table cloth. “What’s this then, ‘Good work, sleep well, I'll most likely kill you in the morning’?”

The Master raised an eyebrow at the indecipherable reference, stood, and adjusted his gloves before turning to go out. “Pleasant dreams, Doctor.”


	2. Chapter II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Doctor's first day requires him to contend with a giant octopus, obscure points of Gallifreyan grammar, and his new Master's confusion of epistolary bickering with bonding.

The Crane Wife   
Chapter 2  
  
  
  
The Doctor scratched at the skin under the cuffs. He knew the degree to which they chaffed and constrained him was largely a product of how much he detested wearing them, but that didn’t stop him from feeling a persistent, irritating itch on the top of his left wrist that he’d give a regeneration to be able to reach.  
  
Someone had slipped the wrist cuffs and the collar on him while he slept. It had probably been the nurse who’d seemed so pleasant, he thought sourly, irritated that the last two medical professionals he’d been treated by had been more interested in his bright future in forced labor than in his health for its own sake. He’d been exhausted after the Master (having enjoyed a good chuckle at the Doctor’s expense) had excused himself, but even so, he  _should_  have tried his luck then, when they’d still (quite accurately) thought him incapacitated. That said, taking advantage of his regeneration trauma-induced weakness seemed hardly fair.  
  
The slave-control equipment he now wore was standard fare the universe over. The Doctor had no doubt that the brassy metal cuffs were equipped with tracking mechanisms as well as electric circuits to protect those mechanisms from tampering. The circuits might even prove capable of administering a remote-controlled shock to a slave who’d wandered too freely. The Doctor wondered darkly if they were going to be used as a means of behavioural control as well—‘behave or you’ll get a nasty shock’: that sort of thing.  
  
In the course of toppling the odd oppressive regime, the Doctor had learned how to deactivate just about every such accessory. Most had either a standard lock or a circuit he could get at. These, however, were like no model the Doctor had ever seen before. He wasn’t even sure he knew where the controls  _were_  on the things. The baffling uniqueness of the devices said worryingly impressive things about both the Master’s technical ability and his standard of security. Escaping was going to take rather longer than the Doctor had anticipated.  
  
The cuffs slid neatly under the sleeves of his jacket, and he was  _almost_  able to forget them, provided he didn’t look down and catch a flash of the glinting metal. The collar, however, was humiliatingly obvious. The torque sat heavily on his neck, and he couldn’t  _help_  but be aware of its presence at all times, couldn’t conceal the thing under his jumper or coat. Everyone who saw him would be able to tell instantly that, thanks to one stupid long-scarf-related slip-up while touring the Pharos Project’s radio tower (and one subsequent plummet to the ground), the Doctor had wound up the personal property of the Emperor of Hestin.  _Lovely._  
  
The lab technicians were, with the exception of himself, all free men and women who had chosen to work for the Master. The lab’s director, Professor Linme, introduced him to everyone civilly enough, but it was obvious that the staff wasn’t accustomed to encountering slavery as an institution, and that his presence confused and discomforted them. Which was fair enough, the Doctor thought—his presence here confused and discomforted  _him_  at least equally.  
  
After some awkward hellos, Linme dismissed the group and brought the Doctor aside. “And this,” the older man frantically cleared a nettle of tools and wires from the only dusty, disused counter in an otherwise neatly-kept lab, “will be your work station, Doctor.”  
  
“I see.” The Doctor jammed his hands into his pockets and gave a friendly smile. “And what exactly will I be doing, Linme?”  
  
“Well, most recently the Palace had been experiencing some trouble with the matter replicators in the cafeteria. Order a hunk of raw aggedor meat or– or a Pan Galactic Gargle-Blaster, if you like, but you’ll be getting cold tomato soup either way. Well, I say soup—really its more an ice cube that tastes of tomato and refuses to melt, no matter how long you leave it out. We can’t figure out exactly why it likes a solid state so much, but there it is. We’ve had some success with blending the cubes—the resulting paste is, at least, more palatable than the cubes.”  
  
“Ah, like gazpacho,” the Doctor observed. At Linme’s blank look, the Doctor explained, “It’s a sort of cold soup. Originated in Andalusia—very popular in the summer. On Earth, that is. Though I can’t imagine anyone wanting it for every meal."  
  
"Well, naturally. Of course the kitchen staff is completely unprepared to feed the entire population of the Palace three times a day. They’ve been doing as best they can, but we’ve had to supplement their work with rather expensive catering several days this week."  
  
"Hm. Have you any idea what the source of the problem is?”  
  
“We suspect it’s the programming itself—rather than the dispensing machines, all of which are relatively new.” Linme pulled up the appropriate program on a console on the Doctor’s workstation. The Doctor slipped half moon glasses out of his pocket and pushed them up the bridge of his nose. He took the chair and scanned the schematics.  
  
“…I’ll just leave you to it, shall I?” Linme was amused and somewhat impressed by how quickly and completely his unusual new scientist had become engrossed in the problem.  
  
“What? Oh, yes, thank you.” The Doctor gave him a distracted, polite smile and immediately returned to the problem, talking, seemingly to himself, as he did so. As Linme turned to go the Doctor, not looking up from the console, said, “How long ago did you say this all started?”  
  
“Hm? Oh, I’d say the cubes first began turning up intermittently in the place of actual orders about three weeks ago, and the frequency of misfires increased gradually from there. Now not a single order processes.”  
  
“Interesting. Well, Professor, I think we can say with absolute certainty that it’s not the fault of the programming.”  
  
Linme glanced at the console. No large flashing text had popped up to absolve the programming of blame, and short of that he didn’t see how the Doctor could conclude the problem’s source so decisively and so soon.  
  
The Doctor saw the unspoken doubt in the Professor’s expression and felt rather piqued at not having his cleverness immediately recognized and respected. It was the collar and the cuffs, damn the Master. And possibly the floppy blond hair that he was continually having to swipe at to keep his glasses from looking like windows obscured by heavy golden window treatments of questionable tastefulness.  
  
“Well, that was hardly  _likely,_  was it?” he snapped. Defensiveness and irritation made his voice too sharp, and he caught himself and continued in more pleasant tones. “You’ve run this programming for some time without fault, after all. And when did you get these new machines?”  
  
“Six weeks ago, I’d say, but we checked them over when the shipment arrived, Doctor. Every single one of them!”  
  
“And I’m sure they worked perfectly at the time, Professor, but I’m equally sure that they’re the cause of all this. Which way’s the cafeteria?”  
  
Bewildered, Linme gave the Doctor directions and a tool kit. Ten minutes later the Doctor returned with a grease smudge on his nose and a mug of tea.  
  
“You have a—” Linme gestured, and the Doctor glanced at his reflection in the monitor screen. He set the tea and the tools down, took out a cream handkerchief, swiped his nose efficiently, and returned the square to his coat pocket.  
  
“Thank you, Professor. It seems the fault lies in the data couplings—you bought the new machines from Rika traders?” Linme nodded, and the Doctor continued. “I thought as much. Close to Hestin Prime, just recently reopened to trade with the ascension of a less isolationist Infanta, and, thanks to a prolonged exile from the wider universe, woefully economically depressed. The Master would had to have been stupid not to take advantage of such promising new suppliers, and while I’ve heard a great many negative things about the man, that particular charge has never been laid against him.  
  
“The trouble  _is_  that Rika was already a closed world when all the galactic standardization agreements went through. There’s no reason you should have remembered that, it happened long before you were born. By now you’re so used to everything from everywhere working seamlessly together that it might never have occurred to you to check something as elementary as the compatibility of the electrical currents. The new replicators run on 200 Rikan Plats, which is about 120 UW—about half the normal galactic standard, you see? The machines had more power than they knew what to do with. It took them a few weeks, but they burnt through their own memory circuitry. At first that would only have caused a few misfires, but now you have a complete reversion to the boilerplate order on your hands: solid, cold, vegetable matter. Uncomplicated as it is unappetizing, I’m afraid. It also takes very little energy to produce—useful, if you’re a machine with a built-in imperative to conserve power when supplies are dwindling.  
  
“I’ve managed to cobble together some adapters to equalize the power displacement at the actual line-level, but while they’ll serve as a temporary solution, we can’t expect them to hold for long.You’ll have to order replacement parts and construct permanent adapters, but that shouldn’t take more than a week. Meanwhile, have you got any milk? I find the replicated substitute never tastes quite as it should.”  
  
Linme, at a complete loss for anything more intelligent to say, told a passing assistant technician to go and fetch the Doctor some milk. The assistant looked between them suspiciously.  
  
“I don’t know that anyone but his Lordship keeps—”  
  
“Tell his steward I’m requisitioning a pint, she’ll let you through. If she gets too inquisitive, just say it’s for an experiment.”  
  
With a doubtful look, the assistant left.  
  
“Thank you.” The Doctor sat down in his chair again, crossing his legs and rolling his mug of tea between his hands.  
  
“Thank  _you_ , Doctor. You’ve saved the kitchen staff from going mad. I’ve diverted three people onto this from other projects and none of them came up with anything. We’ll have to tell his Lordship about this right away.”  
  
By now, Linme was convinced that the Master’s latest acquisition was, as often happened with the Master’s ideas, something that looked mad initially and then turned out to be absolutely genius. He itched with the need to order a buttered roll and coffee, and so, instead of writing up the Doctor’s results, he showed the Doctor how to use the internal communication system and scurried off to the cafeteria in search of sweet, long-overdue caffeinated relief.  
  
The Doctor typed up a short note in Hestin Common explaining, without going into too much detail, that the ice cube issue had melted away. Then, with a frown, he went back and edited out the pun—in all likelihood the Emperor of Hestin had absolutely no appreciation for humor, weak or otherwise. He attached a diagram with the fault circled and forwarded the whole thing to the Master.  
  
The assistant returned with his milk, and the Doctor took it with thanks, adding it to his cup and leaning back to enjoy his pleasant morning brew. A moment later, a new message pinged on the screen, and the Doctor clicked it open, expecting the congratulations and appreciation that typically flowed forth when he’d found the solution to someone’s problem.   
  
  
  
 _If you imagine that, in your first half an hour, you have solved a conundrum that has vexed Linme’s best minds, then I assure you that you have done it wrong. While I have been otherwise occupied and haven’t had the opportunity to examine the replicators myself, I nonetheless find your claim highly unlikely. Start again, and this time perhaps you might actually accomplish the task you’ve been assigned.  
  
—The Master _  
  
  
  
The Doctor nearly spit out his tea on the keyboard. Of all the unbelievable cheek!  
  
He began to write back to the Master in common, then had a better idea, and switched to Gallifreyan. This was easier said than done, as the computer did not support anything like a Gallifreyan font. The Doctor had to draw his circles freehand as neatly as he could using a stylus on the screen. When he thought he’d done a creditable job, he pushed ‘send’ with a hard smack. A few nearby scientists turned to look at the source of the emphatic computer-abuse.  
  
“Sorry,” the Doctor murmured sheepishly, settling in to wait for the Master’s response.  
  
  
***  
  
  
The Master looked up from the agricultural survey he was reading at the sound of the beep that signified an incoming communiqué from his science department. Ah, the Doctor again. What was the man playing at?  
  
The Master’s eyebrow rose ever so slightly in surprise when he opened the letter and saw Gallifreyan. The topmost hemisphere, in chilling politeness, identified the sender and the recipient. While the Doctor’s (surprisingly good) familial qualifications were spelled out with unmistakable authority, the lines where the Master’s might be indicated were left insultingly blank. Granted the Doctor didn’t  _know_  the Master’s and thus couldn’t have included them, but he might well have omitted his own for politeness’s sake. While the Doctor could, with some plausibility, deny that he’d meant to be rude, the intended snub was still blatant. His curiosity piqued, the Master opened the files relating to the Doctor’s House in his stolen Matrix data, intending to peruse them later.  
  
Turning his attention back to the letter, he saw that the lower semi-circle detailed the entirety of the mechanical problem with both enviable precision and an eye-catching turn of phrase. Where it became necessary to speak of the configuration of the circuits in question, almost any Gallifreyan would have wasted time tracing the several swoops and curls such a description would have necessitated. The Doctor’s calligraphy, however, flowed seamlessly into a structural drawing of the circuit, which laid out its design and the reason it had failed so intuitively that no slightly intelligent recipient could possibly fail to understand him.  
  
Having bothered to look at the Doctor’s work, the Master saw that he’d been in error. Not only had the Doctor figured out what was wrong more quickly than the Master might have anticipated anyone but himself doing, he’d taken the next step: done the necessary jiggery-pokery to get the machines working again for the moment, and intuitively seen how to implement a long-term solution. The Master was not a little impressed, but after having been (subtly) insulted he could hardly tell the Doctor so.  
  
Not noticing that he’d begun to grin a little, the Master composed a reply.  
  
  
***  
  
  
Glaring at his terminal, as if daring it to show him the Master’s response, the Doctor was startled by a hand tentatively tapping his shoulder. It was only Professor Linme. The Doctor relaxed.  
  
“Has his Lordship had a chance to respond?”  
  
The Doctor opened his mouth to tell Professor Linme what he though of ‘his Lordship’s’ response. Fortunately the terminal began to beep before he could start in on the Master, and the Doctor lunged forward to open it.  
  
“What’s that?” Linme asked of the indecipherable spirograph drawing on the screen.  
  
“Hm? Oh, it’s Gallifreyan,” the Doctor said absently, eyes rapidly scanning what looked to Linme to be an absurd amount of information (if it indeed had any semantic value at all).  
  
“You can read Gallifreyan?”  
  
“Of course I can.” The Doctor’s eyes narrowed as he tried to puzzle out what he was looking at. “I  _am_  Gallifreyan.”  
  
Linme, a bit startled, wondered whether any of the questions he wanted to ask could be politic.  
  
The Doctor blinked at the unusual form. He couldn’t immediately make any sense of the letter—recognition of what he was looking at hovered on the edge of his recollection and then slammed into him.  
  
“That  _bastard_!” Linme blinked at the Doctor, startled. The scientists who’d turned their head at the Doctor’s rough handling of his send button began to wonder whether this new arrival was going to prove a problem.  
  
The Doctor, mouth open to let the indignation out, was looking at a dialect of pre-Reform Gallifreyan one only ever saw in historical texts—the whole letter was couched in the demeaning, childish grammar ancient citizens of the Citadel had used to communicate with their barbarian slaves. The Master had pointedly included his (unsurprisingly good) familial qualifications and stripped the Doctor’s down to the single-hash which designated an inanimate object, or a slave. The Doctor strongly suspected he was being baited. Perhaps the move was technically rather clever, even amusing, but the Doctor was in no mood.  
  
In addition to insulting him, the letter ordered ( _ordered!_ ) him to start investigating a particular waste-disposal chute that had been spitting rubbish back up in the faces of people trying to use it. The inner-circle which indicated tense suggested that the Master thought this might take the Doctor upwards of three days to sort out. The insufferable cheek! Paying no attention to his titular superior, the Doctor grabbed his toolbox and stomped off to the wing that housed the offending chute.  
  
Two hours later the Doctor was bidding farewell to the giant cephalopod who had been living in the chute, munching the trash and generally gumming up the works. It hadn’t particularly wanted to be there. Oooooooroot*fwap!* (as he called himself—that last being the noise produced by an accompanying tentacle wiggle) had been innocently living on a swamp planet when one of the Master’s scout ships had come in for a look around. Oooooooroot*fwap!* had smelled something juicy in the exhaust pipe, and before he’d known quite what was going on he’d been sucked up and brought back to Hestin Prime. Not knowing how to communicate with non-telepathic beings, he had tried to make the best of things. There’d even been some rather pathetic attempts at making things homey with a bit of interior decorating which made use of the refuse in the garbage chute—the Doctor had tried to be kind about his banana-peel chandelier. Poor Oooooooroot*fwap!* had obviously been alone for quite some time.  
  
The Doctor had coerced another scout ship to drop the creature back from whence it had come. The octopus was riding comfortably in the ship’s hold even now, having tearfully promised to name one of its next brood of hatchlings after the Doctor. Oooooooroot*fwap!* had insisted even after the Doctor had blushed and tried to tell it that that really wasn’t necessary, thank you all the same.  
  
Back in the lab, the Doctor composed a message and hit reply with a bright grin. Finished and back before tea time— _that_  would show the smug git.  
  
  
***  
  
If asked, the Master wouldn’t have admitted to having been waiting eagerly for the Doctor to get back to him. He had, however, assigned the other Time Lord’s correspondence a distinct claxon. When he heard it he tossed the pad he was working with across the table and opened the Doctor’s letter immediately.   
  
The first time the Master read it through he was confused, even disappointed, by the lack of counter-attack.  
  
“ _Master,  
  
I am delighted to inform you that the giant cephalopod inhabiting waste chute 89 has been repatriated to the Bog World of Smekkit. The cephalopod in question was quite cooperative and proffered its sincerest apologies for any trouble it might have caused during its sojourn in your sanitation system. Please contact me with further instructions, and good day to you, sir.  
  
Yours humbly,  
  
The Doctor.”_  
  
  
He’d already come to expect better of the Doctor than submission too easily won. Looking over it again, something nagged at him, and with the subconscious awareness of patterns and mathematical logic common to linguists and cryptographers, his eyes skated back to the letter’s third word. It had a relatively common base-shape, with an accent that told the reader what meaning to assign it. In fact every third word shared those characteristics. Taking a sheet of paper from the drawer the Master wrote down all the possible meanings that accentuation could give the base shapes in question, and, with a triumphant smile, he drew a line connecting the alternates that formed a coherent sentence.  
  
 _“Of course I’ve finished already, you self-contented prat. I hope now that the replicators are fixed you order something with bones for dinner and choke on it. Yours sincerely, the Doctor.”_  
  
Chuckling in appreciation for the visual pun, the Master sent the Doctor one of the project files he had earmarked as deserving his own personal attention. The plan to increase internal security in the Palace by restoring the ancient, increasingly decrepit walls had been languishing at the lower end of his queue for the better part of a month, though the problem wasn’t pressing enough to merit an immediate response. He kept his note curt, not giving away that he’d cracked the code.  
  
The Master frowned when only an hour later the Doctor’s ring-tone sounded again. There was absolutely no way he could be done yet. Opening the letter, the Master’s suspicion was confirmed. The Doctor wasn’t finished. Instead, he’d written a detailed explanation of why the work already done in the file—whose was it, by the way?— was fundamentally wrong. The entire concept of including a force shield current in the new walls, which would run off the building’s ambient energy and would be impermeable to most laser based weaponry, was _inspired_. If the walls were highly charged enough to provide a decent barrier against intruders armed with more conventional weaponry, however, they would be a constant danger to the Palace’s inhabitants. The walls might even be turned against them if intruders should gain control of the building. What was needed was something equally impregnable, but less easy for an outsider to make use of. The Doctor recommended Draconian fractal paper. Paper wall screens were ubiquitous on that planet. They could be controlled by psychic energy stored in reservoirs, could be honed until they were sharp enough to cut through armor and scales, flesh and bone, and could be made sturdy and sound-proof more easily than you might think. A person with psychic ability, like the Master, could wrest control of the structure back with his mind alone if the reservoir system were compromised.  
  
The Master wrote back that it was  _his_  ‘inspired’ work, actually, which the Doctor was dismissing—and how did the Doctor propose they go about attaining quantities of this paper? Draconia had been closed to all trade for half a century after the major pandemic that had swept through their quadrant. While the Master’s TARDIS could naturally visit a period before the quarantine had gone into effect, his time capsule wasn’t a freight service. Additionally, though he didn’t mention it to the Doctor, the Master preferred not to return to that planet due to some business with the Ogrons that had occurred, for him, centuries ago, during a period in which the Daleks had absconded with his TARDIS.  
  
"Ah," the Doctor replied an instant after the Master had sent his response. “My apologies. And I’ll simply put in a word with the Red Emperor.”  
  
The Master blinked at his screen, got up and walked to the lab. There, he accosted the Doctor without bothering to greet anyone else.  
  
“Do you seriously expect me to believe you intend to  _ring up_  the Emperor of Draconia?”  
  
“No, I expect you to sneer at me incredulously and then look extremely foolish when I do just that.” The Doctor arched an eyebrow at him.  
  
The Master surged closer, until there was very little room between he and the other man. “I won’t tolerate your insolence,” he hissed into the Doctor’s face.  
  
The Doctor’s eyes widened and he swallowed, but he held his ground. “How interesting—I won’t tolerate you underestimating me. Or your high-handed manner, for that matter. Your communicator, if I might?”  
  
The Master thrust it out, and the Doctor took it, stepping back out of the Master’s reach. “Thank you. Now, let me see. If I can just—ah!”  
  
Static cackled for a moment, and then a voice broke through. “Thissssss is Commander Kyo of the Palace Guard. By what right do you use this frequency?”  
  
“The Doctor to speak to the Red Emperor, if you could put me through.”  
  
“The  _Doctor_?” The Draconian seemed taken aback. “ _The_  Doctor? A moment, sir.”  
  
When someone next spoke into the communicator, his voice was old, and brittle as cracking leaves. “Doctor. To what do I owe the honor?”  
  
“The honor is, of course, my own, your Majesty. I thought I might put you in the way of some business.”  
  
“Business?” the Emperor cackled, which fell into coughing before it subsided. “Not, if I recall, a subject you have ever expressed a great interest in, Doctor. Besides, our world is still cut off from even our imperial possessions, on your advice.”  
  
“I meant for the duration of the  _plague_ , your Highness, as well you know.” The Doctor shifted his weight, now paying more attention to the communicator than to the Master, who was watching him intently.  
  
“Very true, Doctor, but for all your wisdom you do not know my people.” The Emperor sighed, and there was a sound of heavy fabric settling around him as he shifted his body. “If we reopen ourselves to contact with the outside, this time with our Empire devastated, we will loose face. Here on Draconia, encountering only ourselves, we pretend that we cannot feel the loss.”  
  
“‘Is the star in the darkness not a sun in its own right?’” The Doctor quoted the proverb with an arch look, glancing over to make sure the Master was paying attention.  
  
The Emperor’s laughter rattled down the line again. “True enough, Doctor, and we are not without uses for funds. I will consider any proposition put to me. Yet I should still prefer to conduct such an exchange discretely. The rest of Draconia need not know. I shall have my purser attend to you on this frequency on the morrow.” As a matter of court etiquette, the Emperor could not concern himself with low questions of finances. He could not even ask the Doctor exactly what goods he knew of a buyer for. To do so would have been indecent.  
  
“Gracious as ever, your Majesty. My life at your command.” The Doctor waited until the Emperor had cut the transmission, as protocol demanded, and then tossed it the communicator back to the Master, who caught it in his right hand.  
  
“You’re a noble of Draconia.”  
  
The Doctor shrugged as if it were of little importance. “An honorary noble, actually.”  
  
“And you know the Emperor himself.”  
  
“Naturally – he enobbled me. And an excellent Sazou player he is, too. Do you know the game?”  
  
“I dabble,” the Master admitted, with a slight smirk that meant he was sickeningly good. “Now Doctor, explain to me how this fractal paper of yours can be rendered useful.”  
  
The Doctor proceeded to explain, and the Master proceeded to tell him he was talking nonsense. No, the Doctor assured him, he most certainly was not, and he detailed the many and varied ways in which he was right. Perhaps he had a point, the Master considered, but what about doing  _that_  instead. The Doctor admitted he’d never considered  _that_ , but it was brilliant—and it would work even better if—  
  
A few hours later they came up for air, the Master grinning madly at having reached a solution wildly beyond his highest expectations, at having completed the hellishly complicated, tedious job in a single afternoon, and with the fierce pleasure of having collaborated with such a powerful, intriguing intellect. The Doctor, he flattered himself, looked a bit flushed as well—though perhaps that was just the dregs of regeneration sickness. The Master had an absurd urge to ask if it had been good for him, too.  
  
“We've missed lunch,” the Doctor observed. “And dinner as well, it seems. I hardly noticed.” Everyone else who’d been working in the lab seemed to have gone home.  
  
“No, nor did I." The Master stretched. He glowed with self-satisfaction and magnanimity. "You know Doctor, initially I thought you were going to be merely competent. It’s a rare Gallifreyan who’s not a genius by the standards of most races, but it’s a rarer Gallifreyan still whose mind isn’t useless for anything more than a recapitulation of received wisdom. I admit, I considered you as I might a mere utility. This, however,” the Master’s eyes gleamed as he took in the work spread before them, “demonstrates all the ingenuity and craft of a mind nearly the equal of my own!”  
  
“You know, until that last, you almost sounded complimentary.” The Doctor leaned against his workstation, left spent by the breathless ferocity and duration of their efforts. “I was halfway to being flattered.”  
  
The Master laughed. “Excellent, Doctor. I wouldn’t want you to feel your talents were unappreciated. Come, we’ll have a late dinner.”  
  
The Doctor stood up straight and slid his hands into his coat pockets. “Thank you, but I prefer not to eat with my captors, as a rule.”  
  
The Master’s grin twitched at the unexpected hit, and his voice tightened. “Then this will be the occasion on which you make an exception. Don’t be tiresome, Doctor. I’m perfectly aware that you desire the return of your freedom, but I have no intention of granting you that privilege, especially now that you’ve proven so supremely useful to me. You can either be petulant at every opportunity your situation affords you, or you can live quite pleasantly here in the Palace under my care.”  
  
The Doctor gave a flinty smile. “If I'm so 'useful' a person I can hardly require anyone's care. I’ll share your table, Master, but I intend to escape as soon as I possibly can.”  
  
“And I,” the Master took a step towards the Doctor to emphasize his point, “have no intention of letting you.”  
  
The Doctor grinned, brightly. “We’ll see, shan’t we? Now, I believe you mentioned dinner. I find I’m rather hungry.”  
  
The Master threw an arm around the Doctor’s shoulder and led him towards his private rooms. “I have the most peculiar desire to order something with bones this evening,” he said with a chuckle, and the Doctor laughed with him.  


 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which fanatical alien berserkers invade the palace, and the Master has a more serious problem.In which fanatical alien berserkers invade the palace, and the Master has a more serious problem.

The Crane Wife   
Chapter 3

 

Two days into his captivity, the Doctor came up with an (almost certainly) infallible escape plan. He had only to wait until the scout ship, which had been dispatched to repatriate the giant cephalopod, returned in order to act on his ideas. By leaving the Palace and boarding the scout ship, the Doctor planned to trigger his slave cuffs’ perimeter violation response. He could use resulting shock to short out the ship’s isometric controls. The pain would probably knock him out, but only for a short duration. Then he could abscond with the ship and seek out his TARDIS. Of course, in order to get anywhere near the ship, he’d have to get past the Master’s obscenely good security forces, which might prove to be more difficult even than it looked. But the Doctor was confident he could manage. After all, he’d previously escaped from Alcatraz, the Terrible Prison World of Floog, and even his Great Aunt Fiona’s interminable slideshow of holiday photos from her trip to Wells. He had until the end of the fortnight, when the ship was expected back, to learn what he could about the layout and arrangements of the Palace complex.

A second problem troubled the Doctor still more deeply, however. He suspected the Master knew more than he claimed to about the whereabouts of the Doctor’s TARDIS. The Master might even have the ship hidden away somewhere near at hand. If that was the case, the wisest course of action would be to stay and ingratiate himself into the Master’s good graces, to wait for the other Time Lord to grow careless and say something revealing, to search the TARDIS out himself, here, within the confines of the Palace.

Still, he could be wrong, and meanwhile the Doctor felt he had to try and escape. The mere thought of belonging to the Master made him squirm, agitated him more even than such an abysmal situation seemed to merit.

Not that the Master hadn’t been cordial these past weeks—far from it. He’d conducted himself according to impeccable standards. He hardly seemed the Doctor’s slave master, more a gracious host, almost a dear friend of long standing. The Master had invited the Doctor to take almost every meal in his company. He frequently fetched the Doctor out of the lab asking for his assistance on whatever projects he was personally attending to at the time. The Doctor hardly minded. While he didn’t feel himself intellectually outdone by the Master, he privately admitted to relishing the pleasures of collaboration. To luxuriating in the Master’s praise and appreciation (all the more valuable because it came from that particular source).

The Doctor had only to mention that a certain book or bit of equipment would be useful in his work, and the Master had it delivered to him. In the morning the Doctor would come into the lab, slipping a white lab coat over his cream jacket and wondering whether it was an Earl Grey or an English Breakfast sort of morning. He’d turn to his desk only to find a helmic regulator or what have you sitting boldly on his chair, accompanied by a note from its purchaser, as if it were a present. The other scientists’ envious, appreciative responses told the Doctor the Master wasn’t always so obliging about supply requisitions.

Naturally the Master had an unbelievable amount of money to spend as he liked, and excellent connections to exploit. But even if such a gift was easy for him to give, the Doctor, who had foraged all his life to obtain decent equipment without drawing the attention of the CIA, appreciated receiving it. Appreciated being so considered. However greatly he detested being owned in principle, at times, especially in the other man’s presence, the Doctor forgot to feel the indignity of being nominally forced to do the Master’s bidding. When he brooded on his situation at each day’s end, struggling to fall asleep in the uncomfortable collar and cuffs, he cursed himself for his complicity.

Once, as a youth, the Doctor had managed to get himself lost without a map in 19th century Constantinople. It had been one of his first excursions in time, before he’d learned to pilot the TARDIS properly (well, ish), or even to use her telepathic language circuits. He’d found himself adrift, buffeted by the unintelligible, insistent caress of foreign words, tracing uncertain paths through blind alleys and thick-crammed souqs. Bewildered by a thousand novel, intoxicating sensations. By the bazaars, full of color and sound. By the gardens with their thousand commingled scents. By the city itself, with its million souls and its ten million soft, dark mysteries. He had just such a sense of being overwhelmed in the Master’s company. The man’s mind was unlike any the Doctor had ever known, Byzantine and rich. Working with him was baffling and rewarding, as challenging and as seductive as loosing himself in the strange, labyrinthine heart of that ancient city had been.

Of course, the Master represented a fresh opportunity for the Doctor to learn more about his father’s people, but more than that he was charming and witty, well-traveled and even better informed. The Doctor—never forgetting what the Emperor was—enjoyed his company. He wished they might have met in different, less adversarial circumstances. They were of an age—they might even have been boyhood friends, had the Doctor been reared on Gallifrey.

But as things stood there was no help for it. The Doctor knew very well he had to leave at the first opportunity.

***

The Likkaut attacked eighteen hours before the scout ship was due to arrive back at the Palace. The primary lights cut out without warning. A scientist across the lab cursed in frustration: his delicate experiment had been ruined by the sudden deprivation of power. Red secondary lights flickered once, twice, and then they came and stayed on. A low klaxon whined down the corridor outside the lab door, and a frazzled Professor Linme came out of his private office carrying a communicator that was crackling with radio chatter: troop movements, from what the Doctor could make out.

“Everyone in!” Linme started waving the confused scientists into a back room that normally served as a botanical sample storage bay. The Doctor suddenly realized that someone—probably the Master—had been incredibly clever and decided to shore up the facility for use as an emergency shelter. The scientists could be trapped in the greenhouse for days and still have adequate supplies of oxygen, food and water. Whatever his moral character, the Master was a truly remarkable man.

Curious about what was going on, and hardly averse to interfering if he decided he didn’t like it, the Doctor walked towards the hall door instead.

“Doctor,” Linme called from the door of the bunker, “stop dawdling. My standing orders are to seal the room with all civilian scientific personnel inside!”

“I’m just going to pop out and have a look around, Professor. Go ahead and seal the door. I think I can manage.”

“How? You’re a non-combatant!” Linme sputtered. “And his favorite besides. He’ll have my head if any harm comes to you!”

Irked at being treated as if he were the Master’s beloved pet, the Doctor scanned the hall up and down before stepping out into it. "If I see the Master, I'll let him know that you put up a valiant struggle, but, sadly, I eventually managed to overpower you. I won’t be long. See you on the other side.”

“Doctor!” Linme pulled at his white hair in frustration. “What am I going to tell him? What am I to do?”

“Well,” the Doctor said brightly, craning his neck to judge whether he could detect any sounds of action from either direction, “you might smoke me a kipper.”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind, Professor. I’ll explain later.” The Doctor took a coin from his pocket and flipped it. He examined the result with a frown and then discretely turned it the other side up on his palm. He slipped it back into his pocket with a satisfied nod. “This way, I think.” And the Doctor started down the corridor, whistling.

Murmuring “oh dear, oh dear, oh dear” under his breath and shaking his head, Linme slid the door home and punched in his security code.

***

The Doctor stopped whistling when he smelled something burning. He peered around a corner carefully, but could see only wisps of smoke in the hallway. Sparks spurted from a few dozen broken wall panels. The Doctor threaded his way through the jagged shards of components that coated the floor, moving towards the throne room and control center. He was careful to keep as far away from the sizzling exposed connections as possible. He stopped dead when he heard the distinctive click-whirr of a laser rifle being cocked. He held up his hands to show he carried no weapons.

“Ah, hello. I was wondering if perhaps you could explain what’s going on here.”

“Doctor?” The Master emerged from behind a structural column, turning back to address his troops. “Stand down, gentlemen, he’s one of ours. Doctor, what exactly are you doing here? You should be safely out of the way. I’ve told Linme to secure his people in the event of a situation.”

The Doctor lowered his hands and shoved them in his coat pockets, raising an eyebrow. “I’m afraid I insisted on having my own way. And you might not credit it, but I assure you, I am capable of looking after myself.”

“Really,” the Master sneered. “I suppose I must then have been hallucinating only a moment ago, when you walked, utterly defenseless, into a corridor thickly blanketed with smoke, directly into the firing range of my guards?”

The Doctor arched an eyebrow. “And yet I’m perfectly fine, as you see.”

The Master registered surprise, then laughed. “My dear Doctor, your survival is a matter of purest luck.”

“Something I include in all my plans. It’s never yet failed me.” The Doctor considered that statement for a moment. “Well. Hardly ever. This is, well, my element. My raison d’etre. Interfering in crises, repelling invasions, fermenting rebellions, averting disasters, rescuing the odd kitten from a particularly daunting tree—you really should run background checks on the people you enslave, it’d save me a great deal of embarrassing self-promotion. What I mean to say is this is hardly the first or even the most impressive occasion upon which I’ve been under fire, and if you can tell me exactly what it is you’re up against, I may be able to help you.” The Doctor paused a moment, and remembered to smile. “Please.”

The Master studied his face. “You know, Doctor, I do believe you’re telling the truth.”

“Well, I admit, I was having you on about the kittens. They tend to rescue themselves.”

The Master’s lip quirked. He studied the Doctor as if weighing him, and with a sharp nod came to his decision. “We’re being assaulted by Likkaut dervishes—have you heard of them?” He began walking, his guards following and the Doctor keeping in step with him.

“Likkaut?” the Doctor frowned, trying to place the name. “I don’t know that I have.”

“It’s an extreme religious cult—one which has recently attempted to make inroads in the Hestin system. I normally pay religious crazes as little attention as they deserve, but the Likkaut are an unusual breed. Their order advocates absolute dedication to simplicity.”

“As in clean living, lots of hearty gruel and single-fiber clothing?” the Doctor asked, wondering as he did so what was so fearsome about the space-Amish, and indeed how they could even be said to attack. Perhaps they had come by offering pamphlets and home-made pies, and the Master detested door-to-door proselytizers.

The Master chuckled. “I’m afraid the Likkaut definition of simplicity is more elemental in nature. Their eventual goal is to reduce all complex matter to its ‘unspoiled’ original condition, for all living creatures to return from the primordial soup from whence they came. They believe that, once they’ve eradicated all traces of higher order, life itself will be reborn in a purer form.”

“Ah.” The Doctor frowned. “I take it they don’t ask politely before reducing people to their component parts?”

“You guess correctly. Their berserker troops have a particularly fearsome reputation. In the service of their faith they ingest a unique cocktail of chemicals. The draught breaks down all higher brain function. It also destroys the Berserker’s capacity to process pain at a neurological level. They suffer from an inconsolable rage, a cureless madness. They destroy everything in their path, without ever succumbing to fatigue or pain. Including each other, should they get too close. At the end of an engagement their priestly masters come along to retrieve the survivors and convey them to their next target.”

“That sounds— terribly inconvenient for everyone involved,” the Doctor said. “Except possibly the priests.”

“One might put it that way, Doctor. It’s particularly tiresome to those of us trying to run an Empire in an orderly fashion. The Dervish Legions have as yet been merely a local nuisance, but my intelligence network leads me to believe they recently succeeded in waylaying a Movellan convoy after it had been weakened in a conflict with the Daleks. The Likkaut have thus acquired better transport and weaponry than they’ve ever previously had access to. They could easily become a universal threat, though at present I find myself infinitely more concerned by the threat they represent to my palace.”

The Doctor frowned, disturbed by the prospect. The Master’s well-defended Empire aside, this region of the galaxy had already been deeply unsettled by the long war between the Movellans and the Daleks, who had yet to enter the two-century stalemate he himself had helped bring to an end in the relative future. The Likkaut might well take advantage of conditions of such desperation and despair to indoctrinate a steady stream of converts. Whatever qualms the Doctor might have about the Master’s appropriation of power, his regime was certainly superior to anarchic chaos, and his administration was more legitimate than a predatory nihilistic theocracy.

“Where are we headed?” the Doctor asked, having privately invited himself along.

The Master raised an eyebrow. “My guards and I are investigating reports of intrusion in the South Corridor. Some of the Likkaut have already come through here, as you can see by the damage, but I’ve dispatched the entirety of the advance force. All of my guard stations have mobilized, troops are being held in reserve at various points en route to the control center. If the front line should be forced to retreat, they’ll have cover and reinforcements standing ready to receive them.”

The Doctor stoped and leveled a severe look at the Master, forcing the other man to stop as well. “It’s hardly necessary for the Emperor himself to lead the squadron most likely to see combat. Why aren’t you sheltered in the control center? You’d hardly be the first ruler to get himself killed by insisting on ‘riding out with the front line.’”

“Why aren’t you in the emergency shelter?”

The Doctor hadn’t considered it quite like that. He grinned, quick and bright. “Touché. Shall we?”

“What makes you think I’m not sending you right back in the direction you came, now that I’ve sated your insufferable curiosity?” the Master asked, but he sounded more amused than annoyed.

“I’m afraid I’m not entirely satisfied. Yet.” The Doctor clasped his hands behind his back. “Besides, I’d only ignore you if you tried, and you’re far too busy to punish me for insubordination at the moment.”

The Master’s look soured. “Doctor, when I give you an order—”

“I will circumvent, willfully misinterpret and generally disregard it to the best of my ability. You’ll find you get along much better with requests. Now, I believe we were headed in the direction of the bottleneck?” The Doctor started walking, this time forcing the Master to keep pace with him. The Master’s guards followed along behind in a string, like baby ducklings after their mother.

The Doctor turned and walked backwards, hands clasped behind his back. “I’ve only just noticed these corridors are wide enough to march troops through. That’s almost unheard of in a palace this age—I assume you did a bit of Haussmannisation when you took the place.”

The Master looked at him blankly, and the Doctor, not for the first time, lamented how few people properly appreciated human cultural references.

“Haussmann,” the Doctor explained, “was an architect who redesigned the medieval city of Paris at the behest of the King of France. He destroyed the city’s close-crowded buildings and alleys in favor of wide boulevards on a geometric plan. Of course this allowed troops and artillery to move about the city with all the ease of blood flowing through arteries. The development scheme was aimed at facilitating military policing as much as it was at modernizing and beautifying the capitol.”

“How interesting.” The Master grabbed the Doctor by the elbow, steering him around the live wire he’d come close to stepping on while speaking. “And yes, I suppose I did. Well-observed, Doctor. When I came into possession of it, the Palace was—” he stopped and held up his hand, indicating that the troops should halt as well.

“Can you hear that?” he murmured to the Doctor.

As the Doctor was shaking his head, a sliver of sound reached him and he stopped. It came strange and sharp, like something hard on metal, but without the resonant clang-scrape of steel on steel. The Master, with feline stealth, crept to the intersection where their passageway met another. He peered around the corner. Without looking back he motioned for the Doctor to join him. Pressing close to the shorter man in order to see, the Doctor looked. Three women and a man, far down the corridor, were energetically thrashing at the walls with blades that resembled long, white reaping sickles.

“That explains to damage to the paneling,” the Doctor observed, then frowned. “What are those things they’re wielding?”

“Bones,” the Master said curtly. “Their victims’, each others’. The Likkaut aren’t overly scrupulous about the source. They rend whatever they kill, harvest the meat for food or sacrifices and use the bones for cudgels, as you see. They prefer to use the sharpened pelvisas a axe shaft, usingthe attached bones of the leg as the handle—their priests pour resin over the joints to set them and preserve the bones. The edge wears off quickly, but there’s always a fresh source of materials near at hand, and the psychological advantage the weapons confer on the Likkaut is far from insignificant.”

One of the Likkaut swung in their direction, as if she’d heard a noise. She staggered a few steps forward, listening intently. The Master drew a thin, elegant laser blaster from a holster at his waist and tried to press it into the Doctor’s hand. “Take it,” he hissed when the Doctor wouldn’t close his fingers around the hilt.

“I prefer not to carry guns,” the Doctor shoved it back towards him.

“And I prefer you alive, Doctor.” The Master, though he hadn’t taken his eyes off the party of Likkaut, was clearly growing irritated. “The Likkaut aren’t interested in your sensibilities and won’t hesitate to rip you to shreds.”

“Then it sounds as if we’re going to need a better plan than ‘take pot shots at the few of them we can see with a laser pistol’.” The Doctor stepped back, and grudgingly, the Master withdrew the blaster. “How many do you think there are?” The Doctor leaned down to whisper into the Master’s ear, heedless of how distracting that was.

The Master, not turning, spoke in a low voice. “It’s impossible to be sure. They disabled the security systems with an EMP—you must have noticed when the lights cut out and we had to switch over to backup generators. Ours is the only squadron to have reported any visual contact thus far.

“There’s a grate nearby the kitchens use to draw up water from the cistern. The previous residents called the well the Sunken Palace. It extends for miles, supported by a forest of marble columns. I’ve had it sealed and secured, naturally, but provided the Likkaut were taking appropriate advantage of their recently-acquired Movellan equipment, the EMP pulse they used could have allowed them to break through the locks. If the Likkaut came up through the cistern, as I believe they did, by now they could have landed dozens of their dervishes directly under the Palace.”

The Doctor winced at the grating sound of humanoid bone hacking relentlessly at the wall. “We’ll have to get past these four to investigate, I suppose.”

The Master smiled, taking something from his jacket pocket. “I’m afraid so, Doctor. Of course,” he gestured towards the lab with his blaster, “if you’d rather turn back, you are, as I believe I made inescapably clear, more than welcome to.”

The Doctor glared at him, but otherwise ignored the dig. The Master toyed with the sphere in his hand. A green light came on, and the Master, stepping out into the hallway, cleared his throat and grinned, glancing over to make sure his audience was watching. “Now Doctor: please attend carefully.”

With a terrible scream the Likkaut at the end of the hall rushed towards their prey, and the Master deftly bowled the ball. It came to a stop in the dead center of the path, about ten meters in front of the advancing party. The orb shot out gas, and as they pushed past it the wavering purple streams got into their hair, their mouths, their nostrils. The Likkaut began to move more slowly, to stumble and drop. The struggled on, one falling to his knees only a meter away from the Master, still clawing at the calm, unmoving Emperor, managing almost to touch his boot. They convulsed and then lay still.

“A nerve gas of my own design,” the Master explained to the Doctor, who’d stepped out into the hall to observe the prone Likkaut himself. “The effect is temporary, but they’ll be comatose for no fewer than forty eight hours.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “Any time, the rest of you.” With an air of sheepishness the Master’s guards followed the more intrepid Doctor into the hall.

The Doctor had bent down to examine the Likkaut. His hand hovered over one of the women’s faces, but, hesitant, he glanced up at the Master. “How is the toxin the priests use on them transmitted?”

The Master knelt down beside him. “Ingestion, not via the skin. She should be perfectly safe to touch.” The Master watched the Doctor’s long, pale fingers gently tilt the woman’s head up. He closed her bank, starring eyes.

The Master couldn’t entirely explain away the stab, the clutch of desire he felt, watching the almost avian arc of the Doctor’s hands—the spread of his fingers elegant as a wingspan—as he lowered her head to the floor and took a sample collector from his jacket. Flicking the cap off, the Doctor jabbed the end of the collector into her arm, and the sample cavity blossomed red.

“I’d like a better look at their neurotoxin,” the Doctor offered by way of explanation.

“An excellent notion.” The Master stood, straightened, and helped the Doctor to his feet. He swallowed as the hands he’d admired curled and tightened around his gloved ones before the other man pulled back. “This way.”

A few turns brought them to the grating, or where the grating had been. The metal, cut through, lay in jagged pieces on the floor. The Master motioned to one of the guards, who shone a powerful light down the stairs that descended from the former grating into the cistern. The sweep of it revealed nothing and no one, and the Master could hear nothing but the deep cave drip of the water below them and the Doctor’s breath at his side.

“Could you throw another of your gas bombs down?” the Doctor suggested.

The Master shook his head. “Our options are far more limited than that. The stairs descend deep into the bedrock, and the chambers below are far too extensive for a gas bomb to be of any use. It would be like adding a drop of poison to the bathwater of someone you’d like to assassinate.” The Master gestured one of the guard forward, and when the man called back the all-clear he climbed through, dusting off his jacket fastidiously as the Doctor clambered in after him. They started down the stairs, both preceded and followed by the guards.

“Are these still in use?” the Doctor asked, staring up in wonder at the high ceilings, the elaborate carvings on the walls.

“Certainly.” The Master scanned the way in front of them with the beam of his torch, wary and tense. “The ancient Hestinians were remarkable engineers. Their systems are still largely functional, and there’s an undeniable elegance even to their most utilitarian public works. The state rooms are uniformly exquisite.” The Master cleared his throat and offered, casually, “I would be delighted to give you a proper tour of the Palace, Doctor. If you would be interested.”

The Doctor watched his hand. He held it out, tracing the carvings along the wall as their party descended. He smiled, though only the wall could appreciate the gesture. “I should like that, thank you.”

Unobserved by the Time Lords, one of the rear guards silently elbowed his compatriot in the ribs. The poked guard rolled his eyes, sighed, and internally reconciled himself to being 20 credits poorer.

At the bottom of the stairs they found themselves in an antechamber to the cistern. The cistern turned out to be a vast room that stretched on for so long it was hard to make out the other side. The Doctor, looking up, observed a vast, rusted portcullis, drawn up into the stone above them. The Master caught the direction of his gaze and had opened his mouth to offer a comment when he heard a small splash. His head whipped in the direction it had come from, and he brought the torch to bear. Nothing. With narrowed eyes, he aimed it further back into the gloom.

At first it looked like nothing, still, but then the Master made out, near a pillar in the middle of the room, a flicker of movement. A humanoid figure. And another. As he slowly panned the light around the room, his eyes grew wider.

“A few dozen troops?” the Doctor parodied him in a tight, quiet voice. “I’d estimate more like a few thousand.”

“Yes, thank you Doctor,” the Master hissed back, “I had noticed.”

Towards the back they were thicker-crammed, but none of the Likkaut had moved any further towards the stairs than the center of the room. They hadn’t rushed the palace itself on their own bloodthirsty initiative.

“What are they waiting for?” the Doctor murmured. “Surely not holding off until the moment of greatest strategic advantage? They don’t seem capable…”

“I suspect their handlers have trained them to respond to some form of attack command,” the Master mused. “Perhaps a particular sound, or—” His torch beam attracted the attention of one of the Likkaut trudging in the room’s center. The grime-smeared, wild-eyed man let out a low, grotesque moan that swelled, becoming a shriek that echoed in the cavern vastness. Other Likkaut took up the cry, and they began to surge across the shallow water towards the stairs at astounding speed.

“Or a light,” the Doctor finished for him.

“Come on,” the Master growled, tugging the Doctor along. “Back up the stairs, now.”

The Doctor, looking back to gauge their progress, resisted. “Do you see how fast they’re moving? We’ll never make it to the top in time! And even then, how are we to stop them from—”

“We certainly don’t have any hope of outrunning them if you don’t come now, Doctor!” the Master hissed through his teeth. His troops were already a few steps up, obviously itching to run. Only their loyalty to the Master had kept them from fleeing already.

“Give me one of your bombs.” The Doctor held out his hand.

“What—”

“There isn’t time to explain!”

“There’s only enough poison in them for a score of people, and if a few still bodies clog the doorway, the Likkaut will simply rip through them and keep coming!”

“Master, just trust me, please!”

With a furious expression, the Master shoved a bomb in the Doctor’s open palm. The Likkaut were streaming into the antechamber. The Doctor took a step back and aimed, light reflecting off his wrist cuff as he wound up and let fly. The heavy ball hit the wheel that controlled the portcullises’ counterweights with enough force to set it turning, then spinning, and the gate slammed down in front of the Likkaut. The Berzerkers toppled into each other, shoving their limbs through the lattice, writhing in uncomprehending, desperate fury.

“A perfect spin bowl,” the Doctor announced contentedly to no one in particular. “If I do say so myself. I might go so far as to call it a jaffa.” He glanced over his shoulder at the Master. “You did only just tell me their technology was largely still in good working order. Your kitchens draw water from the cistern. I took a chance that this was one of those devices that was still operational.”

“My dear Doctor,” the Master couldn’t restrain a delighted laugh, “you are incomparable.”

The Doctor observed the Master’s high color, his Cheshire grin. “You know, I think you’re enjoying this far too much.”

The Master took a step closer, chuckling. “And I suppose you aren’t? No, you admitted as much yourself, Doctor. This is your element.” The Master turned back to his guards. “Come along.” He took the stairs, briskly, commenting to the Doctor as he went, “I want to reinforce the portcullis with a force field—it was hardly built to take the strain of thousands of mindless zombies crushed up against it.”

***

Back in his private laboratory, the Master established his force field and then, as the Doctor had feared he would, asked for the blood sample he’d collected. The Doctor took it from his coat pocket but held onto it, pulling back slightly when the Master reached for it, as if he were a little boy on the playground who didn’t want to share.

“What exactly do you intend to do with this?”

“I will take care of the Likkaut problem permanently, Doctor—which killing a few thousand foot soldiers, if that’s what you’re afraid I’ll do, could never hope to achieve. I deplore such unsophisticated solutions. Now, the vial, if you please.” The Master made an impatient gesture and, reluctantly, the Doctor held it out to him.

“Excellent,” the Master said, plucking it from the Doctor’s fingers. “You’ve made the correct choice.”

“I hope I have.” The Doctor fixed him with a steady, unyielding look. “I could do this, you know. Surely it’s my job.”

“Surely it’s my palace,” the Master parried, “and I’m thus entitled to do as I choose within its confines. No, Doctor.” He swirled the sample, holding it up to the light to better gauge its color and viscosity. A slow smile spread across his face. “You shall have to wait. I know exactly what I’m going to do.”

***

The Doctor released his coworkers, none of whom, were comfortable with the seething army of raging maniacs trapped underneath them with nothing better to do than stew and occasionally eat each other. The scientists weren’t much better off. Still running on emergence power, they had nothing better to do than stew and occasionally eat each other’s biscuits. For four hours the Doctor helped the neighboring biologist work through his stash of caramel-chocolate wafers, stopping only when the Master entered the main laboratory, heading straight for the Doctor’s desk.

The Doctor opened his mouth, but the Master interrupted him. “Watch, Doctor.” He gestured the Doctor to a chair and flipped on a camera feed. It displayed footage of the cistern.

The Master paid no attention to the other scientists in the lab, who formed their de facto audience. “Any moment—ah.” From manhole covers in the maintenance crawlspace over the cistern, masked servants, on the Master’s instruction, dropped small pellets. The objects were small and white, and their descent was almost impossible to track. When they hit the reaction was remarkable—the water seemed to sizzle, and streams of gas bubbled up and enveloped the panicked Likkaut.

“Are you killing them?” the Doctor whirled on him.

“Hardly.” The Master leaned back. “I’ve retro-engineered the Berserker neurotoxin.. When they wake up, they’ll be as capable of higher functioning as ever they were.” A group of the Likkaut wavered and disappeared, and the Master’s self-satisfied grin widened.

“You’re teleporting them,” the Doctor realized. “Right back to the ships they came from.” The next batch disappeared, and then the next.

“I found their Priests floating above the North Pole, hiding from my scanners in the electromagnetic chatter. I don’t envy the Likkaut Priests when the Dervishes awaken,” the Master chuckled darkly. “Perhaps some of the soldiers were true believers, but I suspect many of them were misled or pressed into service. Even those who imagined they knew precisely what they were agreeing to might find their sanity an unwelcome burden after all they’ve witnessed and done.”

The Doctor watched the slow evacuation of the cistern. “That’s terribly cruel to any innocents among them. And even to the guilty.”

“Crueler than perpetuating their servitude to the Likkaut Priests, trapped by their own hellish madness? Which would you prefer, Doctor? Guilt, or that savage, uncomprehending ignorance?”

“There should have been another way,” the Doctor murmured to himself, but then he shook his head, stood and turned. “I don’t mean to– that is to say, I’m not unimpressed. You contrived a brilliant solution where you might, with some justification, have resorted to butchery. And you dealt with that group in the corridor remarkably well. Throughout the entire situation you were— pretty, sort of—”

The Master raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“Sort of—”

“Yes?”

“Marvelous.”

The Master smiled incorrigibly, relishing the moment. “Marvelous?”

“Yes, certainly,” the Doctor cleared his throat and hoped he didn’t look flushed. “You’ve prevented a great deal of catastrophe today.” He shifted his weight, propping himself against his desk. “Some of the Dervishes might even recover and break the power of the Likkaut from within.”

“That was accommodated within the scope of my plan, Doctor,” the Master gave him an indulgent look, leaning back against the Doctor’s desk as well, splaying his hand out on its surface. “Possibly because I prefer to rely on more solid variables than hope and luck. You were magnificent yourself.” The Master chuckled. “You positively saved me in the cistern. And with primitive sporting skills.”

The Doctor glared severely at him over his spectacles. “I’ll have you know that cricket is far from unsophisticated. You even managed a fine bowl against that advance patrol. You’ve the potential to be a perfectly adequate linesman, if only you would put this Empire business in mothballs.”

With a scoff the Master turned to go, but the Doctor cleared his throat. The Master turned back. “What is it, Doctor?”

“It’s just— you’re going to have to let go,” the Doctor pointed out, looking down at his waist where, sure enough, the Master’s treacherous arm had at some point in the conversation come to rest, seemingly of its own volition. His fingers were curled securely around the other Time Lord; in attempting to leave he’d been half dragging the Doctor along with him.

The Master let go as abruptly as if he’d been burned, took a step back. He gave the Doctor an odd seasick look and swept out of the room with all the dignity he could muster.

***

That evening the Doctor was enjoying a cup of tea, reading in bed and vaguely contemplating his impending escape. He had always enjoyed a bit of down time after out-smarting Davros or surviving an encounter with hostile aliens or what have you. A mixed stack of Agatha Christies and P.G. Wodehouses currently dominated his bedside table. The Master had kindly offered to order him whatever books he might require—Hestin was, after all, on galactic trade routes—and the Doctor had, after making polite protestations, taken liberal advantage of his generosity.

The knock on the door startled him.

“Yes?” he called cautiously.

“There’s something I must speak with you about.” It was unmistakably the Master. The Doctor supposed the man who ‘owned’ him didn’t technically need to knock at all, much less worry about the unseemliness of the hour. He looked down, checking what he was wearing—blue pajamas that buttoned high on the neck—fine, perfectly respectable. He slipped his reading glasses off and sat up over the side of the bed. “Come in.”

The Master slipped through, shutting the door behind him. He was holding a device of some sort.

“Give me your right hand,” he instructed the Doctor. The Doctor rubbed at the cuff there, hesitating. The Master raised his eyebrow. “I trusted you today, Doctor, with my gun, my explosives, even my life. Surely you could extend me the same courtesy. Now give me your hand.”

The Doctor grudgingly held out both his wrists, compliant and simultaneously contrary.

“I intend to release you from these,” the Master indicated the cuffs, “and give you the run of the palace.” He took careful note of the Doctor’s shock and some stranger emotion—perhaps a trace of quickly hidden disappointment. He put that aside to consider later. “But in order to do so, I require something of you, Doctor.”

The Doctor thought of the Erlkönig, of human fairy tales, of bad bargains foolishly made. His wide eyes turned wary. “What is it you want?”

“Simply your word,” the Master said, gently enough. “Your parole, if you will. You’ve been good enough to tell me that you plan to attempt to escape.” He’d seen how very willful and capable the Doctor was today, and had already taken steps to increase his security accordingly. “The urge is natural enough, though foolish and regrettable. I could easily keep you chained, but the degree to which even your current bondage discomforts you is obvious. I would prefer you,” he met the Doctor’s eyes, “to be comfortable. All I want, for the moment, is your promise that you won’t use this particular display of trust in order to escape me.”

The Doctor was silent, and the straining moment stretched between them long and aching, like the stalling trail of light in parallax which marked the movement of a ship in space just before it burst into speed superior even to that of light.

“Do I have it?” the Master pressed.

“Yes,” the Doctor murmured. “You have my word.” There was no way to say no and affect tomorrow’s intended escape plan, of which the cuffs were an essential component. To try and say no now would look so suspicious that the Master would lock him in his bedroom for the day, citing wretched ingratitude as just cause, if nothing else.

“Good.” The Master, pleased, removed his gloves and leaned over the Doctor. He passed his device over first the left cuff and then the right, then covered the Doctor’s slender wrists with his bare hands. He stroked the metal—letting it detect his bioprint, the Doctor realized. The cuffs snapped off under his touch, the left falling to the bed, the right bouncing off the counterpane and clattering to the floor. The Master’s skin seemed especially dark curled around the Doctor’s white wrists, which had hardly seen the sun since he’d regenerated.

The Master knelt on the bed, and the Doctor bowed his head. The Master’s thumb skated over the nape of his neck, rubbing against the downy-gold hair that swirled there. “This will only take a moment,” the Master murmured, holding the collar between his thumb and forefinger. The Doctor obligingly bent into his touch, hyperaware of the other man’s proximity, in his bedroom, in his bed, touching him. He drew in a sharp breath when the lock clicked apart under the Master’s fingers, which seemed to hesitate over his skin a moment too long.

“There,” the Master said, drawing the torque away. “I trust you feel less burdened?”

“Infinitely less.” The Doctor looked at him with sincere gratitude, and the Master, returning his gloves to his hands, had to admit to himself that removing the cuffs was not so much a reward for services rendered as a gift, an indulgence. The coy propriety of the bedroom scene made the Doctor all the more enticing. A prim blue pajama top (waiting to be unbuttoned). Matching, captivating, blue eyes (waiting to darken and flicker shut with desire). Skin that glowed warm in the dim light of the reading lamp (waiting to flush under his touch). And wearing socks, for Rassilon’s sake. The Doctor was ridiculous, brilliant, terribly desirable, charming in every particular.

Had he ever wanted anyone so fiercely? He could remember no comparable occasion—in fact, in the Doctor’s presence, it was worryingly difficult to recall any person he’d ever previously entertained designs on.

The Master swallowed. “I’ll— leave you to your reading. Goodnight, Doctor.” He stood to leave, turning towards the door, his back to the bed.

“Thank you, Master.” The Doctor’s voice stopped him for a moment and the Master nodded, stiffly, before leaving.

He had, he thought, on the somehow especially long and lonely walk back to his rooms, a very serious problem.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Doctor and the Master fence, argue about biocolonialism, and enjoy a completely ridiculous degree of UST.

The Crane Wife   
Chapter 4  
  
  
  
  
  
The Master didn’t sleep with anyone in his inner circle of staff because it was so obviously a terrible idea. He’d hired his people because they were exceptionally talented, which meant they were also difficult to replace. Firing them was therefore out, and the Master did not want anyone he had to see every day to join the cadre of his disgruntled former lovers. Risking the productivity, harmony and security of his palace because he just  _had_  to fuck a comely engineer or some such would have been exceptionally foolish. The Master had no patience for fools, and no intention of making one of himself.   
  
Thus far he’d been lucky, and had never been sorely tempted to sleep with any of his underlings. He was excessively fond of sex in this incarnation, but he saw to such cravings by seducing someone he need never see again—someone who lived a life entirely unconnected with his own. After the Likkaut invasion the Master had given himself a stern talking to and resolved to maintain his indisputably prudent policy of abstention.   
  
But the next day he’d gotten into a row with the Doctor. Hestin Beta had been contracted by an intergalactic agricultural products conglomerate to manufacture ‘suicide seeds,’ which were to be genetically modified to produce only sterile offspring. This protected the Master’s intellectual property and forced farmers to buy new seeds every year rather than replant saved seeds from their previous harvest. The Doctor, predictably, sided with the impoverished indigenous farmers who would eventually buy the seeds from the agricultural conglomerate, railed against this classic biocolonialism, and absolutely refused to work on the project on ethical grounds.   
  
When the Doctor wouldn’t do as he was told and insisted he knew better than the Master how to run an Empire, the Master’s repressed romantic impulses took the form of a feverish desire to shove his infuriatingly stubborn slave back over his lab table, bend his shapely legs up and fuck some respect into him. He’d been surprised by the persistence of the fantasy, and by the elaborate detail it took on in his mind, seemingly of its own accord. Days later he was still daydreaming of the Doctor’s neck–arched back, strained with harsh breath. The Doctor’s mouth—open slightly in a gasp, or of the coy way he might bite his lip to smother a moan. The Doctor’s clutching, gripping, lovely-long fingers, digging into his shoulders through his jacket, encouraging him.   
  
After a second, more vicious row on the same subject, the Doctor got his way and the Master permitted him to remove the terminator genes (even though without them the seeds would sell for far less). In exchange, the Doctor promised to devise alternative projects that would recoup the profits sacrificed to his scruples. Logically the Master could see that he hadn’t lost anything in the reordering of his arrangements, but he still resented having given any ground, and the aggressive energy of the argument buzzed under his skin for the remainder of the day.  
  
That night, after reluctantly giving in to his demanding erection and coming hard to the Doctor’s vividly imagined, moaned, achingly sincere apologies for having ever doubted his Master, the Emperor assured himself that it was only natural. He’d been without the company of another Time Lord some time. The Doctor was appealingly self-confident in a way people seldom dared be around him anymore. He was, the Master supposed, a touch  _impressive_. How handily he’d dealt with the attempted invasion… To say nothing of that ludicrously bright hair, or that unbearably sweet mouth, or what looked like, under those tight trousers, a round, ripe, obscenely perfect arse that positively  _begged_  to be—  
  
The Master groaned as his cock twitched to signal its  _already_  renewed interest in the subject under consideration. This wasn’t helping. In brief: the Master understood why he might want to fuck the self-righteous bastard, but he wasn’t going to. He had better self-control than that. He’d never yet slipped and gotten entangled with a member of his senior staff, and he wasn’t going to start now.   
  
***  
  
When he caught himself fabricating reasons for the Doctor to fetch things from low shelves in the lab, however, the Master at last acknowledged that he had to do  _something_  to cure himself of this fixation. He took a few days’ holiday. In the cosmopolitan capital of the Krii Confederacy, having hypnotized his way past the man checking the guest list, he attended a party for the Grand Duke’s daughter’s christening. He selected a young woman in attendance and spent the evening leading her across the floor in the sweeping figures of Krii ballroom dance, which was similar to, but easier than, Gallifreyan waltzing. When he pressed a hand to the small of her back and murmured a suggestion in her ear, she readily collected her coat and, after a short walk through the snowy night, let him into her townhouse and her bed.   
  
The soft blonde hair, the pale, aristocratic skin, the bright blue eyes, the well-bred, modulated voice, the delicate features—surely all of this in combination came close enough to sate the craving. Just in case it didn’t, the following night, whilst attending a University dinner at the invitation of a scholar of his acquaintance, he happened upon a lecturer who might have passed for the Doctor in a dark room. The young man talked tolerably well, and he was a better fuck than a conversationalist. The Master pronounced himself cured and came home a day earlier than he’d planned. He resumed his regular routine and congratulated himself on his exquisite self-control. The Doctor was, for all his qualities, just a man, and as such was hardly incomparable.   
  
***  
  
When the Master needed to address some specific problem to the Doctor’s attention, he typically walked down to the main laboratory and explained the situation to the other Time Lord himself. That was only polite, wasn’t it? If he was going to take the Doctor off whatever project he had chosen to work on and assign him another task, better to go and make a show of asking. It demonstrated how well treated the Doctor was to the employees who’d expressed concerns about working with a slave. He could justifiably say that he’d never treated the Doctor as anything less than another of his paid, willing servants. Additionally, asking personally earned him points in the terribly polite, passive-aggressive arguments the Doctor insisted on having occasionally about what he delicately referred to as his ‘condition’.   
  
That he went to speak to the Doctor himself on the slightest pretext meant nothing. It was simply refreshing to have an intelligent conversational partner. Another Time Lord—especially one so quick, whose wit and manner made the Master chuckle, even on otherwise humorless days. It was sensible to alert his top scientist to issues as they arose, before they could metastacize into problems. To consult the Doctor on important state decisions—not that the Master was easily swayed, but he liked having access to the other man’s opinions. The Doctor argued passionately and well. If the Master hesitated to entirely abandon his plans because his de facto advisor disapproved of them, he grew used to regularly adjusting them to accord with some point or suggestion of the Doctor’s. No longer suffering from his earlier compulsion, he in no way conducted these discussions whilst imagining fucking the Doctor over any handy furniture.   
  
It was with simple interest that the Master noticed how frequently his visits displaced a crowd of young male and female scientists that had clustered around the Doctor like long-lost cousins around a lottery winner. There the Doctor would be, ringed by his acolytes, smiling amiably and explaining whatever it was he was working on to them in enthusiastic tones. Perhaps the Doctor liked to think aloud, or an audience facilitated his process. The Master had no objection, really, but the crowd of hangers-on was composed of more attractive people than the Master  _remembered_  having hired, and they were all suspiciously well-dressed and pressed, as coifed as they could contrive to be whilst covered by demure labcoats. All adoring the Doctor’s genius with insipid looks on their well-scrubbed faces—it was revolting. It wasn’t even as if people of such limited capacity could properly  _appreciate_  the Doctor’s brilliance.   
  
At midday, three weeks after the Likkaut incident, the Master dropped in to have a quick word with the Doctor and, as casually as possible, to ask him to a working lunch. The Master would offer the use of his own TARDIS for the purpose, and as he walked down to the laboratory, he puzzled over the least embarrassing means of inviting the Doctor to choose the time and place. This would make an excellent surprise—the Doctor clearly missed the variety of scenery and the freedom of movement of his vagabond lifestyle.   
  
He was enjoying a pleasant nervous anticipation at the prospect of the conversation, but that curdled when, walking through the door, he saw a gaggle of five underlings swarming around a working, chatting Doctor. One of them—a bright eyed, dark haired young woman, touched the Doctor’s arm to get his attention. Her hand lingered. The Master’s eyes narrowed.   
  
The Master scanned the crowded laboratory and located its Director. “Professor Linme—a moment, if you could.”   
  
“Hm?” The professor, who had been examining a botanist’s zebra-stripped mushroom with a bemused expression, put down his stylus and came over. “Yes, sir?”   
  
The Master gestured at the scene across the room. “I see the Doctor’s become very  _popular_.”  
  
“It’s a great help to the others, you know,” Linme offered. “He’s so very knowledgeable, and our younger scientists have really taken to him. Their work’s improved as a result, I think.”  
  
“Nevertheless,” the Master pressed, “I think it’s time we reward the Doctor’s good service. Perhaps the time has come for him to have an office of his own, just as you do. Surely we have a disused supply room that could be converted.” The Doctor  _still_  hadn’t extricated himself from the girl’s clutches. “By the day’s end, I think, Linme.”  
  
“Well,” Linme adjusted his glasses, pushing them up the bridge of his nose, “I am getting on, you know. I assume the Doctor’s to succeed me as your chief scientist, and really I can’t say he’s not assumed the majority of my duties already—he directs the others so naturally, you see. He determines the course of a significant portion of the work we do here now, and I can’t pretend he doesn’t know more than I do about a great many fields besides. It might be fitting for him to have a room of his own, to demonstrate his position. Might put a title on the door, as well…”  
  
“Assistant Director will suffice, for now. You’ve never given me a less than exemplary service, Linme. I’ll not shunt you aside.” The Master had learned long ago that rewarding good performance and cultivating loyalty made his position more secure. He didn’t dismiss experienced members of his staff lightly.  
  
“Thank you sir.” Linme coughed. A moment passed as they observed the Doctor brandish a test tube dramatically, to the delight of onlookers, and then launch into a long historical and scientific explanation, to the waning interest of onlookers, who seemed to wish he’d get back to the brandishing bit.   
  
“It’s something of a relief he’s not some sort of  _bimbo_ ,” Linme offered at last, as though this had been on his mind for some time. At the Master’s bewildered expression, Linme continued. “Well, it’s not as if you’ve chosen him just for his looks, is it? It’s not as if many a man in your position hasn’t done just that. But the Doctor’s undeniably bright, and a very pleasant sort of fellow.” Linme paused a moment, then ventured, “Those of us who’ve been with you for some time are, amongst ourselves, quite pleased to see you settling down.”  
  
The Master expression was exactly what it would have been if Linme had stripped off his lab coat to reveal a Vegas floorshow costume and began to perform ‘Her Name Was Lola.’ “I’m afraid I don’t understand you,” he said, through gritted teeth.   
  
“Oh!” Linme started, “dear me, have I got it wrong? I’m terribly sorry, sir. We assumed the whole  _buying_  thing he’s so displeased about must be the old-fashioned way of—of going about the business in your culture, but that you were, er,  _proceeding_  a bit more cautiously than that. In deference to his modern sensibilities and what have you.”  
  
The Master glared at him. “Is that what it looks like, Linme?”  
  
“Oh, well, no, not entirely sir,” Linme thrashed in the quicksand he’d stumbled into, “just an old man’s silly inferences, overstepping my bounds, forget I—”   
  
The Master’s look was implacable. Linme drew a deep breath. “You  _do_  seem very fond of him, sir. And he is one of your own. And he seems very well-suited to you. It seemed there must be a degree of intentionality in all that.”  
  
“ _Did_  there?” The Master turned to give the Doctor another of the intense looks that had convinced Linme and the senior staff they were on the right track with this arranged-marriage theory. The Doctor was still chatting with the staff, still infuriatingly oblivious to the Master’s presence in the room. The Master’s look slumped into a glare. “I wouldn’t mention this… particularly  _amusing_  pet theory to Doctor, if I were you.”   
  
His tone suggested that he didn’t find it funny in the slightest. But it also implied he was determined to see the joke, just as stubborn people not naturally blessed with the ability to see Magic Eye pictures are going to damn well stare at the pictures until their optical nerves rot off and that little sailboat everyone’s going on about crystallizes out of the Pollocky static. Was—was the Doctor actually  _blushing_  at that girl? Oh, now that was  _it._  
  
“Doctor!” the Master bellowed.   
  
The Doctor’s head shot up. He put down his tools, excusing himself and apologizing to his horde of disappointed companions. He started to push through them towards the Master, relieved at having been extricated from Assistant Stacii’s over-familiar grip. He hoped her awkward clutch hadn’t suggested… that is, it hadn’t looked like he might be… or rather, that the Master didn’t think he was- Well.   
  
As a rule, the Doctor didn’t sleep with any of his captors because it was so obviously a terrible idea. He’d thus far never been tempted to do anything of the sort. Certainly not with the unappealing Davrosesque megalomaniacs—not even with the Terrible Zodin, who he supposed would have been quite attractive if viewed objectively--say, by someone she hadn’t tried to lobotomize. The Master, however, was rather difficult to compare to his predecessors, and though the Doctor had reminded himself time and again of the impossibility of acting on any foolish attraction he might have developed, he  _still_  felt awkward at the thought that the Master might assume he and Assistant Stacii were likely to do anything of…  _that_  sort.   
  
“Linme,” the Master snapped, “have that office prepared immediately.” And with that he strode out of the lab and into the corridor before the Doctor could reach him. With a few long legged strides, the Doctor drew level with the Master, who tersely asked if he enjoyed Venusian cuisine. When the Doctor admitted it had been a few regenerations, but he remembered quite liking some of the puddings, the Master barked that that was just  _fine_ , because they were going out for lunch.  
  
***  
  
A week later the Master came into the lab to check the Doctor’s progress in combating a plague that threatened to devastate the agricultural output of Brasp, one of the Hestin Empire’s core worlds. The inspection parlayed into the Doctor taking a tea break with him. The Master instructed the servants to lay on a spread in the solar for the purpose. Perfectly innocently, perfectly unaware of any effect it might have on observers, the Doctor ate a piece of cake. He then used his fork to press into and snag the last crumbs in a boyish manner the Master found—well,  _sweet_.   
  
Whilst he ate, the Doctor cheerfully rambled on about cakes he’d eaten across the universe and the various adventures he’d had in the course of this gustatory education.   
  
“The Judoon—entirely unexpectedly—pride themselves on a delicate sort of Napoleon. They stomp the pastry paper-thin with their enormous feet and space the layers with whipped marzipan-esque cream.”  
  
“What precisely is a Napoleon?” the Master smiled.  
  
“A short, dark-haired military dictator who declared himself Emperor of France despite not actually  _being_  French—you’d like him,” the Doctor teased. “The spiritual leader of the continent was supposed to crown him, and his first wife, as was customary, but Napoleon seized the crown right out of his hands and crowned himself and then his Empress.” The Doctor knew the story was sensationalized and apocryphal, and that  _really_  the coronation’s procedures had been agreed upon in advance, but he hated to let facts spoil a good story.   
  
“A Napoleon is also an eponymous complex and, in this case, a sort of pastry. Mille-feuilles, as the French call it. ‘A thousand leaves’ of dough interspersed with a creamy almond paste. Napoleon's second Empress, Marie Louise, was particularly fond of them. And of me—not in _that_  sense,” the Doctor hastily corrected himself at the Master’s coolly polite raised eyebrow, and then flushed at having tripped over his words in the Master’s presence. Recovering himself, he continued, “She proved a very capable Duchess after her husband’s exile. I stayed at her villa. As a guest of her lover, Count Adam Albert von Neipperg—interesting chap, a spy with only one eye on a planet where most everyone has two. Not really conducive to anonymity, I always thought.   
  
“Anyway, the weekend was nearly spoilt by an untimely Cybermen invasion. They burst through the conservatory windows in the middle of a recital, ruining a perfectly lovely performance of popular Lieder. I managed to dispatch their leader with the Duchess’ gold hairpin by using a recorder, which I’d brought along to accompany the bagpipe performance, as a blow gun.”  
  
The Master chuckled. Even if the Doctor’s stories themselves were wildly improbable, he appreciated how indisputably entertaining the Doctor was. The Master enjoyed simply  _listening_ to the Doctor more than anyone else he could call to mind.   
  
However, despite his commendable effort, he couldn’t deny that he also wanted the Doctor to stop sucking the crumbs off the tines of that fork and try lathing his fingers instead. The Doctor’s pink tongue peeking out of the corner of his mouth to capture a rouge dab of frosting _maddened_  the Master. He disguised the way he involuntarily licked his lips at the sight with a hasty grab for his tea.   
  
What was the use, he wondered as he accepted the Doctor’s offer of another cup with a distracted nod, of the denial he’d been so assiduously practicing? Ignoring this attraction seemed incapable of killing it, and he himself seemed pathologically incapable of  _avoiding_  the Doctor as he obviously should. But the Doctor was so fixated on his enslavement. Even if the Master let himself approach him, the Doctor would likely deny their obvious chemistry out of sheer petulance.  
  
“Are you feeling alright?” The Doctor’s concerned tone brought him back.   
  
“Perhaps touch preoccupied, but I am perfectly well, thank you.” The Master drummed his gloved fingers on the table. “A physical contest might suffice to distract me from affairs of state. But I suppose you’ve never learned to fence—such a pity you were raised off Gallifrey.”  
  
“Ah. Humans fence as well, actually. Another of those strange coincidences the universe seems so fond of.” The Doctor smiled at him. “I might enjoy a round myself.”  
  
The Master arched an eyebrow. “Is that a challenge, my dear Doctor?”   
  
“Ask me for a round.” The Doctor leaned back, arching an eyebrow provocatively. His offer was tailed by the polite silent equivalent of  _if you think you’re hard enough._  The Doctor had the self-contented smile of a man who knew himself to be the very butcher of a silk button, and the Master wanted to trouble the edge of smugness lurking on the Doctor’s lip. Preferably by shoving his tongue down the other man’s throat, because it was a terribly  _attractive_  cockiness, but martial conquests would have to suffice when there were none others to be had.   
  
“Doctor,” the Master smirked viciously, fully confident in his swordsmanship, already graciously accepting the Doctor’s surrender in his mind, “would you do me the honor?”  
  
“I’m your man, Master.”   
  
Sometimes, the Master was very much afraid he was.   
  
The Doctor continued, wearing the gleeful grin of someone about to unleash evil on an unsuspecting world which the Master recognized from the mirror. “You could even call me your foil.”   
  
And sometimes the Doctor made appalling puns, and the Master had to swallow the chuckles they provoked so quickly that he nearly choked on them. Instead he glared severely at the Doctor in a way that indicated he doubted the man had any notion of decency or taste whatsoever.   
  
***  
  
There was a soothing, simple purity to the slide of the swords—the real thing, the Master couldn’t be bothered with coy, blunt-tipped practice epees. The Doctor did fence  _very_  well. And in rolled-up shirtsleeves. He bled from a thin scrape on his shoulder, where the very tip of the Master’s sword had slid under the fabric, across the skin, splitting it ever so lightly and winning him the first touch. The thrust had forced a quick, pained gasp from the Doctor’s pert mouth. The thin, red line blossomed boldly against the soft white of the Doctor’s shirt, against the cream flesh the slit in the fabric had revealed. It was such an ornamental wound, bizarrely reminiscent of the red piping on the Doctor’s coat. Between the way the Doctor moved, his disheveled state, and how very much fun he himself was having, the Master was thoroughly distracted. He wondered whether he could instate this as a regular pastime.   
  
After loosing the first touch, the Doctor took the Master’s measure properly and began to counter the other Time Lord’s strength with his own greater speed. After forcing the Master to exert himself in a series of thrusts which the Doctor lightly spun out of, away from and under, as if they were dancing, the Doctor finally managed to parry in a way that jarred with the angle of the Master’s wrist. The Doctor let the Master’s own inertia wrest the other man’s blade out of his hand. The Master lunged and stumbled, hit the ground and growled, animalistic and viciously angry with himself for the clumsy pary that had cost him the bout.   
  
The Doctor was breathing hard, panting with exertion, gaze sliding down the long, gleaming line of his weapon and directly into the Master’s eyes. The Master stared up at him, surprised by the sudden reversal, transfixed by a sharp blend of fear and arousal. He swallowed hard.   
  
The Doctor could seize the moment to press the blade tip to the Master’s throat and demand to know where his TARDIS was. Could simply slice him open. Granted, the facility was teeming with decent, relatively loyal security staff, and the Master could easily deceive the Doctor if he tried to extract any information from him. But for a moment, the possibility of reversal, abrupt and entire, hung swollen between them. Even in the attempt, the Doctor would be spoilt. A flick of the Doctor’s wrist might drop and shatter their Baccarat paperweight world—all careful contrivance, elaborate arrangement and impossible glass fragility.  
  
The Doctor’s shoulder swung down with easy grace, and he picked up the Master’s sword. He held it for an instant, and then handed it back to the Master with a smile, backing up to give the Master space to recover good footing. He balanced on the balls of his feet for a moment, shifting in his plimsoles, eager for another round. The Master realized that the Doctor had not, even for the space of a moment, considered doing the things he had feared, and he grinned back at the Doctor with delight, with, he thought, perfect, reciprocal understanding.   
  
They fought on until they were giddy with exhaustion. They slumped against each other on the way back to the palace’s residential quarter. They complimented one another, mocked both the Master’s perhaps over-precious High Gallifreyan Traditional technique and the Doctor’s indisputably bizarre human style, until they absolutely had to slip apart to go their tired, separate ways.  
  
Nursing his pleasantly sore muscles alone in bed that evening, the Master considered transferring the Doctor to a scientific establishment somewhere on the periphery of his Empire. From a personal standpoint, it was the sensible thing to do, but ultimately the Master rejected the notion. He could hardly afford to throw away the Doctor’s talents by keeping him anywhere but here, in the palace, where the work on the most pressing and difficult projects was conducted. And the Master respected the Doctor too highly to deny him work that would provide his intellect the greatest possible scope and challenge. Using the Doctor in some lesser capacity would feel like destroying an art museum, which the Master had fastidiously avoided doing, in the course of his empire-building.   
  
***  
  
“ _Doctor._ ”   
  
The Master brought sneaking up behind him to an art form. It was with internal reserves of strength that the Doctor did not drop, smack into or break anything when the Master insisted on invading his space and directly addressing his ear from behind. He was just the right height to really rumble up into it, and his trick of dropping his voice to a sensual murmur was very distressing. At all times, the Doctor was uncomfortably aware that if he leaned back ever so slightly he’d be pressed against the other man, practically in an embrace. The Master’s effect on him was nothing short of humiliating—and completely inexcusable. The Doctor adjusted his collar and forced a nonchalant expression onto his face, even though the Master could only see the back of his head.   
  
“Yes, Master?”  
  
“What are you doing working out here, rather than using the office I’ve given you?”  
  
The Doctor took a steadying breath and made his tone pleasantly conversational. “Using the common equipment. As you see.”  
  
“Indeed. I also see,” the Master purred, “that you’ve delegated your most recent assignment to Quintz. While she’s a fine theoretical physicist, I can think of no one more hopelessly unlikely to bring the project to practical fruition. Upon closer examination, I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that you’re deliberately and systematically fobbing off the projects I put  _you_  on onto some of the other, less competent scientists here.”  
  
“I was wondering when you’d come to that.” The Doctor, still strung tight enough to snap with _awareness_  of just how close the Master was, persistently poured liquid from one graduated cylinder into a somewhat larger cylinder. There was absolutely no purpose to this; it just made him look too busy and important to deal with the Master in a temper.   
  
Behind him, the Master put a hand on either side of him on the desk, trapping the Doctor in the argument. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten your  _position_  here, Doctor. You’re hardly at liberty to fulfill or disregard my orders in accordance with your own whims.”   
  
“ _Really_ ,” am I not?” The Doctor whirled on him, still clutching the beakers, forcing the Master to step back. “How  _can_  I have forgotten? How  _kind_  of you to remind me of my  _position_ ,  _Master_. Now you listen to me. I have absolutely no intention whatsoever of helping you develop armaments. Defense systems yes, fine, agricultural initiatives, certainly, I’m delighted to help, but I’ll not make you guns.   
  
“You have a whole laboratory of paid employees and you managed well enough before you chanced across me. If I can’t dissuade you from this course entirely, then I see no reason why you should assign me to projects you know I find repellent. Unless, of course, you’re deliberately trying to provoke me. I  _had_  hoped we were past that sort of childish cruelty.” The Doctor trembled in indignant rage. The Master quirked an eyebrow, straightened up and slid a few inches closer in the name of discretion.  
  
“You’re making quite a scene, Doctor.” He wasn’t, not really. The two people still at work in the lab had snuck out to the tea room, extricating themselves neatly from their awkward, unintentional positioning as spectators to what seemed to be a very  _charged_  sort of workplace dispute.  
  
“I don’t  _care_.” The Doctor’s cheeks were hectic, his elegant sprawl of a human accent compressed into a tight hiss. Gallifreyan pronunciation had been globally standardized in the Rassilonate era, and the Academy had kept the language safe from either degeneration or evolution ever since. The Time Lords’ isolation was severe enough that no off-worlder ever learned to speak Gallifreyan; no such thing as  _accented_  Gallifreyan could even be said to exist. Yet when the Doctor was tired or irritated his sharp-enunciated, affected Capitoline consonants and his prim, precise vowels puddled into rounder, more English sounds. His slight burr came rougher, and his voice rolled along, exotic and impossible.   
  
The Master had initially been puzzled by, then became very fond of the way the Doctor talked. Gallifreyan shouldn’t have been able to accommodate the alien expressions the Doctor welded to its inflexible structure, but the Doctor  _forced_  the language to adapt to his polylingual gluttony of borrowings, simply by virtue of his rapid, ready wit. The Master had previously considered getting the Doctor drunk expressly to enjoy the sensual slide of his syllables, but it seemed too ridiculous a plot to contemplate.  _Expecially_  as it regarded a man he was still trying  _not_  to sleep with. Nothing about the Doctor, indolent, warm and perhaps all too willing after sharing a bottle of wine, was conducive to keeping that resolution. He already looked so deliciously affected by their proximity. Twitchy, flustered, and all for the Master. It made him want to watch the Doctor quiver under a proper touch.   
  
Why are you  _tormenting_  me like this?” the Doctor demanded.   
  
“Tormenting you?” the Master remembered himself enough to sneer. “You think highly of yourself, Doctor. I’m asking you to perform a service I might ask any other of my servants. Only  _you_  think yourself above my commands.”  
  
“I should hope I’m  _always_  above a command to injure others.”  
  
But the Master had rather lost the thread of the argument. His opponent’s terribly blue eyes became intoxicating in a heated discussion. They fixed so intently on the Master’s face, glimmered with relentless intelligence and passion. The Master had largely forgotten about the tricky deployment system he had wanted the Doctor to retro-engineer from a captured Dalek experimental prototype. Mostly he wanted to stick his tongue in the Doctor’s ear. The Doctor had particularly nice ears: pale, elegant, with thin rims which, in a luxuriant mood, the Master’s tongue was ever-so-tempted to trace its delicate way along, and with chubby lobes the Master wanted to just  _bite_.   
  
“Excuse me, have you even been paying attention to anything I’ve just said?” the Doctor asked, a taunting foot away.  
  
“Not really, no,” the Master admitted.   
  
“Right,” the Doctor huffed, turning around to resume his work, determined to ignore the Master’s irritating interruption. The Master leaned forward. His breath ghosted the shell of the Doctor’s ear. The dark brown hair of his beard brushed the nerveless, light blonde hair on the back of the Doctor’s neck, creating – not contact, only  _just_  not  _touch_ , but static electricity, tension, and a low, bothersome, tight heat that settled in the Master’s stomach and at the base of the Doctor’s long spine.   
  
“You saw fit to circumvent my will, when I quite specifically warned you of the consequences of such insubordination.”   
  
 _“Master,”_  the Doctor said in a strained voice, “I’m very busy–” He fought to hold himself still, to keep from shuddering at the warm breath on the back of his neck.  
  
The Master looked at him with a dark, fond indulgence. His right hand itched to stoke the Doctor’s side, his hip. “Ask me to stop,” he offered.  
  
“Will you,” the Doctor swallowed, “if I ask?”  
  
“You’ll have to discover that for yourself, Doctor,” the Master pushed.  
  
The Doctor took a long breath. “I  _never_  want to work on your weapons projects.” His voice shook itself firm with admirable speed and determination. The Master waited, giving the back of the Doctor’s head a long, lidded look. He waited until that graceful neck dropped a barely discernable faction of an inch. “Please. Master.” The Master savored the extent to which the man was his. Was inundated with the corresponding desire to possess him entirely.   
  
“There.” He settled a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder, tightening it in what should have been a brisk, casual clap. But the touch lingered, a pressure that seemed to build, though he didn’t hold the Doctor any more tightly. “Was that so hard, Doctor?” He purred it even as he pulled back, away, taking hand with him.   
  
The Doctor’s eyes slipped open. “Yes,” he admitted.   
  
The Master chuckled, warm and close, and the Doctor  _wished he would do it_ , terrible idea or no. How would the steady cadence of that almost hypnotic voice fare when the Master lost control? Would he whimper, would he  _moan_ — And in the space it took the Doctor to release his held breath, the Master was gone and the doors were sliding shut behind him. The Doctor could hear the others puttering around in the tearoom. A spoon clacked staccato against an empty mug. He could hear Linme’s voice as clearly as if he were in the room himself—the man was unselfconsciously over-loud in his anec-dotage.   
  
The Doctor wondered what precisely he’d been doing in allowing himself to become at all emotionally  _involved_  with someone who was, in essence an egomaniacal dictator. Oh, it might be lacquered over with a brilliant mind, an engaging sense of humor, and a rather—well, _seductive_  je ne sais quoi, but despite his qualities the Master was anything but the sort of person the Doctor should consider a liaison with. He was a ruthless emperor, who’d furthermore been complicit with and happily taken advantage of the Doctor’s own  _enslavement_. Could this regeneration be a bit off, to be susceptible to this sort of mad infatuation? Surely he wouldn’t have been so weak last time around, or the one before.   
  
It was very embarrassing, but not unconscionable, to have highly inappropriate… feelings—no, surely not  _feelings_  for, just an irritating  _attraction_  to an admittedly charming villain. Just as long as the Doctor didn’t do anything about it. If he had to take up wearing yet another cumbersome scarf, had to ensconce his vulnerable ears and neck in layers of wool whilst he worked, the Doctor was determined to escape captivity without irretrievably destroying his self-respect by losing this body’s virginity to  _him_.   
  
***  
  
The Master, meanwhile, had decided to take a proactive stance. The Doctor was his  _slave_. He was the Master for Rassilon’s sake, and Emperor of rather a lot of planets besides. What was he doing not simply taking what he wanted and damn the complications? He’d fuck the man and get it out of his system. Then he could stop thinking about the Doctor constantly—surely once he’d had the man the parade of fantasies would, having been sated, obediently come to an end.   
  
It was with that end in mind that he waited until absolutely everyone had gone home but the Doctor, who he’d instructed to work on something he’d known would catch the man’s mayfly attention. Coming up behind the Doctor, he stopped a proper meter away and cleared his throat.  
  
“Put that down, Doctor.”  
  
The Doctor’s brow was furrowed in determined concentration. He was holding a deconstructed motherboard in one hand and a ball of string in the other. A jar of peanut butter was perched on the desk awaiting use. “I’ve very nearly got it,” he murmured, completely absorbed.  
  
“ _Doctor_.” The other Time Lord looked up at the Master’s severe expression, and, reluctantly, he put down his components. The Master nodded, satisfied. “You’ll be spending the evening with me,” he announced inflexibly.  
  
“Oh. Will I?” The Doctor arched an eyebrow, leaning back in his chair. “And what will we be—”   
  
Suddenly the Doctor perfectly comprehended his position. He wasn’t being asked to accompany the Master to another of the Empire’s worlds and assist in solving some diplomatic dispute, as he had been last week. Nor was he wanted to share a crate of Gallifreyan fruit (the Master’s merchant space-navy had happened to salvage it from a time-locked hold of a freighter that had been lost millennia ago, back when Gallifrey still traded with other planets), as he’d been the week before that. The Master’s command lacked even the dignity of a seduction.  
  
“Ah. I see.” The Doctor worried his ball of string, rolling it under his palm. “Am I not even to be _asked,_  then?”  
  
And the Master realized that, in his flustered, desperate want, he had come at this from altogether the wrong angle. It put him on the defensive, and, with some irritation, he said “Doctor” in a warning tone.  
  
“I’m busy,” the Doctor narrowed his eyes and assiduously picked up his string again, “with a project you yourself assigned me this morning, if you remember.”  
  
The Master bristled at the rejection. “As you so astutely pointed out, I wasn’t  _asking_.”  
  
“Find someone else, preferably someone who’s doing something less important. I’m sure there’s a bevy of bright young things who’d be delighted to accept your attentions.”  
  
“Doctor—”  
  
“I don’t happen to be one of them. Neither am I a convenient outlet for your—” twin spots of red rose in the Doctor’s cheeks, and it was with great awkwardness he selected the word “ _needs_.”   
  
Fuming, the Master took a step forward, erasing that deliberate meter of space between them. “I could  _make_  you excessively compliant, Doctor,” he hissed. And he could. Threats, aphrodisiacs, the hint of force and coercion in all its ugly forms made the Doctor’s eyes hard and distant.  
  
“Could you really?” he asked, voice perfectly polite. He was well aware that there  _were_  things the Master could do to make absolutely sure he had the Doctor’s attention. A tiny, especially sane sliver of the Doctor’s brain hoped for a promise of torture, a deliberate mention of the people that could get hurt if he failed to play along. Because he’d never be able to forget or forgive that. It would destroy the fragile, insidious sympathy between them. A madder voice whispered that if the Master went that far, the Doctor could have him without assuming any of the responsibility for the act, without taking on any of the guilt—after all, he would  _have_  to let him. It would all be beyond his control.   
  
The Master reached a hand halfway towards the Doctor’s face, and the Doctor’s eyes widened before he realized it was an aborted  _caress_ , not a strike. It was what the Master should have done initially: a touch, a kiss, and he would’ve been caught off guard by how suddenly they’d slipped from aching potential energy into kinetic realization. The Master swallowed, his eyes narrowed, critically, as if he was disappointed in one or both of them, and he left without further comment.  
  
The Doctor slumped in his chair and exhaled. A treacherous fraction of him had the audacity to be  _angry_  that the Master hadn’t made a better show of it now that they’d finally come to the point. He must have known that the Doctor could never have excused himself for giving into a flat demand from the man who claimed to own him. But had the Master deployed that overwhelming, seductive intensity of his, the Doctor might well have been able to justify a slip, to blame it on charisma and the moment. He hadn’t realized the extent to which he’d been waiting for the Master to do something that would absolve him of the burden of consciously giving in, and he was far from delighted to discover it now.  
  
He took up the jar of tacky brown adhesive and, as he dipped the ends of the string into it, he told himself that everything had come out for the best. Now, he’d not be tempted, he’d not cross the lines he’d set for himself in times of sounder judgment. That was as it should be. And he was happy, really, that the Master apparently though of him not as an equal, or a valued friend; not as any different from another of his conquests, or as anything in the way of a romantic partner. Just as some sort of  _receptacle_ , or even as an actual  _slave_.   
  
That the Master couldn’t even be bothered to attempt to properly seduce him made everything so much easier. The Doctor hoped the Master found himself a bland, terribly expensive whore and had a perfectly satisfactory evening, just as he’d obviously done a few weeks ago whilst in the Krii Confederacy. The Master had come back from his holiday with an insufferably smug, post-coital grin plastered on his face. It had been so glaringly  _obvious_ , even to the Doctor, who hadn’t really been paying attention. He hadn’t brooded on it—in fact, it hadn’t been  _at all_ upsetting, because the Doctor didn’t care one  _whit_  what the Master did with himself. The probability that the Master was probably off right now shagging some brainless hussy did  _not_ cause a small pang of nausea to sweep through the Doctor’s stomach. It was just he couldn’t quite get this string to weave properly through the motherboard—  
  
“Dammit!” He’d bent the thing out of shape trying too hard to force it into the right configuration, and a bit of it had snapped off. The Doctor threw the motherboard down with uncharacteristic violence, slammed his elbows on the table and dropped his forehead into his hands.   
  
He typically kept a human sleeping schedule out of habit, but he’d discovered during his first body’s stint at Cambridge that really Galifreyans didn’t need that much sleep to get on. He decided to work through the night, because he found it calming, and because the problem the Master—his  _captor_ —had set him was an interesting one. That was all, and that was fine.  _He_ was fine. He took a deep breath, straightened in his seat, and took up the motherboard again.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which sex complicates things.

The Crane Wife   
Chapter 5  
  
  
  
Since their disagreement the Master had had to come into the lab three times, and on each occasion he’d pointedly spoken only to his director. He’d relayed his instructions to the Doctor through the other man, hoping the Doctor appreciated the slight. His effort at cold detachment was somewhat marred, however, by his long, steady glare at the Doctor, whom he could see pottering around in his office through the open door. Perhaps feeling the weight of the glance, the Doctor glanced up from his work and frowned inscrutably at him. The Master turned away, snarled a final instruction, and swept out of the room (a touch too dramatically, the Doctor thought, even for him).   
  
Linme, who’d been left in the Master’s wake, steeled himself for further dealings with the Drama Lords and walked into the Doctor’s office.   
  
“Stop right there.” The Doctor glared at Linme, deflating the man’s cautiously benign expression. He had had enough. “If the Master has anything to say to me, I have perfect confidence in his ability to tell me himself.”  
  
“Technically, I am your superior,” Linme reminded him, gently. “If the Master wants to convey his instructions through me, he’s well within his rights.”  
  
The Doctor didn’t like Linme’s unvoiced implication that  _he_  was being needy or pettish. “Mm, and as a slave I have none of my own, I suppose. How boorish of me not to accept this imposition gracefully. And you know very well he’s sulking. A Time Lord his age, really. It’s embarrassing to watch.”  
  
Linme tried a sympathetic sigh. “Trouble in paradise, Doctor?”  
  
“I’ve absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, Professor. If owning another person has proven more problematic than the Master expected, it serves him right. Better, in fact, than I ever could.” The Doctor’s body seemed to tighten, and its angles to grow sharper in annoyance. His general genteel charm, however, undermined the effect. The Doctor bristled like a disturbed puffer fish.   
  
Linme raised a taken-aback eyebrow. “Now who’s sulking?”  
  
This earned him a still-more baleful glare from the Doctor. When that unhappy scientist shuffled out, the Doctor turned his venemous expression on the desk before him. There sat a report detailing a minor but persistent engineering issue, which seemed to be afflicting all the ships of the Master’s merchant fleet.   
  
Hours later, the Doctor wondered if, perhaps, he might have solved the problem a touch too enthusiastically. The Master’s ships would no longer be occasionally troubled by sloppy fuel conversion rates. The entire fleet now  _ran_  on an entirely different substance, and had a new communications interface he’d whipped up whilst working through lunch besides –the Master hadn’t come to fetch him for the midday meal as he usually did, the Doctor had decided he didn’t relish the prospect of feeling the significant glances of his coworkers in the cafeteria’s for the second day in a row. Making extra work for himself had seemed infinitely more attractive than enduring their pity and gentle handling. Especially as he didn’t pity himself. He was certain through and through he’d responded appropriately to that—that  _summons._  And he wasn’t still angry and upset, he  _wasn’t_ , because either would imply,  _falsely_ , that he’d cared a great deal in the first place.   
  
The Doctor forcibly redirected his thoughts to a more cheerful subject. He’d gotten to know a good few of the fleets’ chief engineers during the upgrade process. They’d turned out to be, on the whole, very friendly chaps who knew their business and appreciated his help. Their company had (somewhat) alleviated his boredom, and kept him from fixating on his unexpected surge of loneliness he’d felt in the Master’s absence. The Doctor knew himself to be a very social creature. He rarely traveled without companions, he enjoyed  _people_. Apparently he’d come to appreciate the Master’s company in particular—but one should always try and break bad habits.  
  
When the other employees had trailed out of the lab in the evening, the Doctor prodded the Skasis Paradigm in a desultory way, like an old intellectual war wound. He’d answered their goodnights in a rather distracted, short manner, and resumed pacing his office, which helped him to think. He didn’t know how much time had passed since they’d gone, but he jumped in surprise at finding hands suddenly firm on his arms. His datapad clattered to the floor.   
  
The clutch was steadying. The lips that moved against his neck made him shudder slightly. “Perhaps I might’ve gone about that better,” the Master murmured into the skin there.   
  
The Doctor stiffened. He could see the distorted image of himself, bright against black velvet, slight and caught, in the reflective surface of the cabinet straight ahead. The Master was curled around him like a personal demon, like an incubus. The Doctor’s breath caught. He cleared his throat to strengthen his voice, and with it his resolve. “Should I take this as an apology, then?” Why was he letting the Master touch him? He should shove him off, or tell him to stop this instant. What was he  _doing?_    
  
The Master gave an uncharacteristically resigned sigh. “Yes, I think you should.” That shocked the Doctor into stillness—he’d expected anything but an admission of wrongdoing from the Master.   
  
“Come to bed,” the Master’s mouth pressed the words into his neck, warm breath and surprisingly soft lips. The light scratch of his beard. The words sounded more imploring than a command, but so determined. “Please.”  
  
“I thought—” The Doctor’s eyes widened, as if he were prey suddenly spotting the hunter. All bewildered hesitation. “I thought you were still angry. This morning-”  
  
“I was,” the Master admitted. “But I have since decided the manner in which I approached you was—beneath us. Perhaps you were justified in objecting to it.” The Master’s hand slid up the Doctor’s arm, then down again, in a considering sort of caress. “I’ve found your absence distasteful, Doctor, and I believe you feel similarly. If that is true, we would be foolish not to—what was that human expression for making amends?”  
  
“‘Kiss and make up,’” the Doctor reminded him automatically.  
  
“Ah, yes,” the Master’s voice had the barest trace of sly amusement, “the very phrase I was searching for, thank you.”  
  
The Doctor knew what he was supposed to say. He’d thought about how to word it tactfully. He’d thought of how to make his dismissal so blistering it would prevent the subject from ever being raised again. He’d considered eloquent, cutting, rhetorically unimpeachable words—words that would precisely point out the impossibility of him being with the autocratic Emperor of the Hestin, with a man who’d  _bought_  him. A man who damn well knew where the Doctor’s TARDIS was, and who forcibly kept him from a life he loved, from the vocation that  _defined_ him. The Doctor bitterly resented his situation, and he’d given thought to being very cruel indeed.   
  
But now the moment had arrived, and he found the words had drifted from him. He reached for all of them, any of them, and they slipped through his grasp. He could only remember their ghosts: a few phrases of each of his carefully rehearsed variations on the theme of rejection. None of the talking points. It was as if his protests were written in a dead language to which he’d lost the key, as if he had only a badly damaged manuscript to read from. Even the surviving fragments vanished when he felt the Master’s lips press against his neck in what was, indisputably, a brief kiss.   
  
“Come now, my dear,” the Master’s tone was that of an old, accustomed lover asserting his prerogatives. Something about the confidence, the established intimacy of it, lulled the Doctor, made intractability seem strange and unreasonable. The Master tightened his hold, winding an arm round the Doctor’s waist. He let a hand splay across the Doctor’s stomach possessively “It’s been two days,” the Master pressed, as if his absence had been a rhetorical device, his conclusions irrefutable. “You haven’t denied you missed me.” He sucked hard where he’d kissed before, biting the skin in short nips, licking his way up to the Doctor’s ear.   
  
The Doctor had read information in TARDIS databanks which his somewhat stodgy, if well-loved, father hadn’t relished the idea of explaining to him personally. He knew in, an academic way, that the neck was an especially erogenous zone for his father’s people. He also knew that his was a functionally Gallifreyan physiology. His neck had perhaps always been a bit sensitive, but encounters with humans had only touched on the point.   
  
It was as if he’d frequented a very posh cafe and, every day, ordered a standard coffee. Coffee is a respectable beverage, and many people like it best unadulterated. Then one day he’d decided to have a poke around the menu, and discovered that the cafe had innumerable menu options. In addition to coffee, black, one might also purchase cappuccinos, espressos, macchiatos, mochaccinos, Cafe Breva, Cafe au Lait, and a series of embarrassingly luxuriant syrupy flavored drinks designed specifically to make one feel bourgeois. The discovery would have been shocking: who knew that silly old morning beverage contained the potential for such variety? Had the capacity to give such delight?  
  
What the Master was doing to his neck was the Café Americano. The Café Americano as made by  _incredibly_  competent barista, the sort that can draw complicated shapes in the foam, attends the World Barista Championship, and places quite well indeed.   
  
The Doctor wasn’t really in a position to deny or even to admit to any such pining for the Master during the man’s absence, much less to tell the Master to leave off sucking hard enough to leave marks. Surely it was cheating to use his anatomy against him like this? He was left with ineloquent gasping noises, which made the Master chuckle as he switched to the other side. His laughter made the Doctor self-conscious, but he found it difficult to hold onto that embarrassed reticence as the hand on his stomach brushed under his shirt and began to drift in slow, lazy, ever-slightly-lower circles, fingers running over and tracing the bulge of his hardening cock through the material of his trousers. The Master, with a satisfied noise, cupped the Doctor’s erection, making the Doctor squeak in surprise and jump backwards. This brought him into contact with the Master’s own erection. The Master was all too pleased to press himself into that obligingly proffered arse, and the Doctor’s eyes widened, his breath coming shorter.   
  
He didn’t so much as decide to let go, give in, and just sleep with the Master as he found himself not ten minutes later being tossed into a large, comfortable, unfamiliar bed. The Master was clambering in after him, over him, and the Doctor wove under his arm and up, letting the Master fall back on the pillows and climbing on top to straddle his waist. They kissed as the Doctor wriggled out of his coat, and the Master, not very helpfully, simultaneously tried to shove it off him.   
  
The Doctor had to break off and lean back to pull his jumper up over his head. Then he leaned down, cupping the Master’s chin even as the Master pulled him back into a kiss. The Doctor laughed lightly into the soft slip of space between their lips, suddenly amused by the Master’s impatience, giddy. The Master took advantage of the momentary opportunity and slid his tongue into the Doctor’s mouth. He busied his hands with the buttons of the Doctor’s shirt, unfastening the first and second before giving up and ripping the third and fourth.  
  
“My shir—” the Doctor tried to draw back in startled protest, but the Master growled and shoved his head back down. The Doctor’s objections were lost, mumbled into the Master’s mouth. The Master’s left hand migrated from the small of the Doctor’s back, where he’d been clutching the other man to him, down the line of his spine and under his trousers, onto the Doctor’s arse, which he gave a possessive squeeze. He used the leverage to shove the Doctor’s clothed groin into his own, which prompted a rutting shudder on the Doctor’s part as he squirmed into the contact.   
  
The Master brought his right hand up to the Doctor’s temple and stroked a thumb across the skin impatiently, insistently. He smoothed his mind against the Doctor’s, an introductory caress. The Doctor jerked against him and slid back. He’d braced his elbows on either side of the Master’s face and leaned over him, flushed and breathing hard.   
  
“I’ve not done this,” the Doctor admitted suddenly.   
  
The Master blinked at him, confused. Could the Doctor actually think he hadn’t been paying attention? “I’m aware, Doctor. You were in the initial stages of regeneration sickness when I discovered you, and you’ve surely had no opportunity for encounters of the kind since you entered my employ.” As if he’d have tolerated any such nonsense – he’d even had that bothersome Assistant Stacii transferred to waste management the very day after he’d granted the Doctor his office. He’d justified it to himself at the time as the satisfaction of a momentary whim, and had refused to examine the decision too closely. He pressed his thumb back at the contact point on the Doctor’s temple. “I intend to take care.”  
  
“That’s—very courteous, thank you, but not precisely what I meant.” The Doctor sat up. “What you did, just there—well, you know I’ve never hard the opportunity to,” the Doctor struggled for a word that wouldn’t be awkward, “ _encounter_  another Gallifreyan in that manner.”   
  
The Master stared up at the Doctor. The other man was perched on his chest, still wearing his striped trousers, but disheveled in his half-removed, ill-used shirt, with his blond hair thoroughly, wantonly mussed. “My dear Doctor, are you telling me that you’ve  _never_  enjoyed intercourse with a psychic component? Never even wanted to satiate simple curiosity about your own capacity to experience such pleasures?”  
  
The Doctor fidgeted distractingly. “You see I  _was_  quite curious about it in my third body. Shortly after I regenerated I fully intended to seek out another psychic race and politely ask one of them for assistance in my, er, experiments, as it were. But then a battle with a warlord, a war _lady_ , actually—the terrible Zodin—left my TARDIS crippled and my mind temporarily in shambles. I had to limp back to Earth and hire myself out to an intelligence taskforce there. By the time I’d recovered and managed to repair my TARDIS I had more pressing concerns than exploration of that sort. I’d largely forgotten about the whole thing.”  
  
The Master was staring at him.   
  
Defensively, the Doctor added, “I  _can_  shield, duel a bit, create mental constructs and the rest. A bit rudimentary, I grant you, but I’ve always managed to get around the universe well enough without extensive reliance on my psychic reserves.” To have something to do, he’d begun unfastening the Master’s jacket, revealing the white silk shirt beneath it. He unbuttoned that in turn.   
  
The Master swallowed hard at this. He had a possessive turn of mind—especially, he was discovering, where the Doctor was concerned. Physical virginity was undoubtedly interesting: an amusing curiosity, and a regular hazard of regeneration. But to a Time Lord the promise of an entirely untouched mind was heady, dizzying, and delicious.   
  
“You’ve never so much as established contact?” The Master’s voice was tight.   
  
“I’m perfectly aware of the theory,” the Doctor retorted. It was apparently an even more embarrassing admission than he’d suspected it would be. Though he didn’t see why it was so important: sex must still be sex, with or without psychic bells on. He slid off the Master, brushed aside velvet and silk and placed a kiss on the Master’s sternum, and another an inch lower, until his long fingers were plucking at the fastening of the Master’s trousers. The Master lifted his hips to encourage their slide off his legs, shucking his jacket and shirt as he did so.   
  
“You  _have_  done  _this_  at some juncture before, haven’t you?” the Master couldn’t resist.  
  
“I went to Eton,” the Doctor retorted dryly, drawing the Master’s cock out and bending down to give it an introductory lick before the Master could ask what Eton was. He fastened his lips around the very head of the Master’s cock with the diligent air of someone remembering youthful piano lessons, and flicked his tongue around it in a slow circuit. The Master carded through his hair, lifting up bright strands and letting them fall, haphazardly. After a moment he reached out and carded through the Doctor’s mind in the same even stroke, timing the actions for perfect coincidence. Startled, the Doctor’s mouth slipped whole inches down his cock. The Doctor stared up at him, wonderingly, looking deliciously bewildered, every inch the seduced innocent. The Master raised an eyebrow and tried it again.   
  
The Doctor shivered and continued what he’d been doing before. Initially his technique was very good indeed, and it was with a flailing, surreptitious hand the Master fumbled with his bedside drawer and fished for the jar of salve he kept there, laying it beside him for later use. As he did so, the Master did his best to distract the man he intended to use it on. A brief circuit of the Doctor’s facilities yielded up pleasure centers not left jaded by centuries of handling. The merest brush against his synapses had the Doctor gasping around him. Vengefully, the Doctor tried a clumsy push into his own mind. The Master slid everything around, like a TARDIS reconfiguring its corridors, to more directly guide the Doctor where he needed to go. Perhaps it was a touch of hand-holding, but one he didn’t begrudge the Doctor.  
  
He gasped, wide-eyed, when bright flash painted itself inside him, further back than he’d intended for the Doctor to have access. It was as if the best day of his life had been compressed into an instant and set popping like champagne, sensual data from his memory centers bubbling exuberant in him. It was completely unorthodox, but manipulating the essence of those feelings produced a startlingly good effect. Apparently the Doctor intended to demonstrate that while inexperienced, he was fit for more ambitious material than techniques out of  _Every Gallifreyan Child's Pop-Up Book of Introductory Psychokinetics._    
If the Doctor wanted to try something more advanced, the Master was more than willing to show him around—he had good reason to pride himself on his psychic skill in every capacity. He did the equivalent of twirling a finger through the Doctor’s synapses, winding them in close. Then he gave the bundle a leisurely  _pull_. The Doctor audibly enjoyed that.  
  
 _I could get very used to the sound of you groaning around a full mouth,_  the Master teased.  
  
 _Shut up, I’m very busy,_  the Doctor shot back, but like an unpracticed adolescent he’d not quite separated the impulse to communicate from his speech centers, and when he sent a thought he spoke it, producing more pleasant unintelligible mumbling. The Master chuckled at his expense.   
  
The Doctor rolled his eyes and, vengefully, got seriously to work with his tongue. The Master groaned, his eyes sliding shut—something of a tragedy, as he’d been very much enjoying watching the bright bob of the Doctor’s head as he worked. He was still curling the Doctor’s synapses with an inch of his attention, while the rest of him pressed back further into the pillows and enjoyed the slow suction. He mentally nudged a flow of approving praise the Doctor’s way and considered mentally directing the Doctor to do what he liked best, but Doctor slid over a spot the Master knew to be particularly sensitive, noted the small hitch of his breath, backtracked and did it again. He seemed to be sickeningly quick at picking all that up the old fashioned way, and the Master had no complaints.  
  
When he was very, very distracted by the Doctor’s explorations he felt a slick finger sliding gently around the rim of his anus. “Doctor!” the Master protested aloud. His eyes were open now and he searched for the (missing) tin of lubricant beside him.   
  
 _You’ve every intention of using it on me,_  the Doctor pointed out reasonably.  _It seems perfectly fair._  Again those interesting humming noises, the delightful, sweet buzz of his throat around and a flutter of lips on his cock. The finger persistently circled, dipping just slightly, pressing a little.  _May I?_    
  
The Master knew it was a rather arbitrary nod to Gallifreyan patriarchal taboos, particularly as he was now an iconoclastic rebel, but he typically  _didn’t_  let anyone. He hadn’t even tried it in this body. The vulnerability and exposure it demanded smacked of being stripped of power, the commodity he held most dear.   
  
Thus it was without knowing why that he stared into the Doctor’s enquiring blue eyes and gave a tight nod. The Doctor slowly slid his finger in past the tight ring of muscle and crooked it perfectly, making the Master gasp and shut his eyes again. He made a noise he didn’t want to call a whimper when the Doctor carefully stretched him. The Doctor slipped in another long finger and curled them hard. He seemed almost to pull the Master up, bucking into his warm mouth, by the force of them.   
  
Shaking hard the Master grabbed desperately at the bundle of synapses and wound it tighter and tighter, until the Doctor mewled. The Doctor’s fingers slipped out and his previously skillful ministrations dissolved into simple hot suction around the Master’s cock, basic and good. There was a desperate, insatiable hunger in the way he took the Master deeper into his throat, until his lips encircled the base, in the greed with which he sucked the Master, who strained and thickened in his mouth.   
  
Relaxing in the restoration of control, though not a little disappointed by the loss of those deft, industrious fingers, the Master played until the Doctor looked up at him with glazed, lost eyes, his loose hair mussed, his mouth open slightly and panting around him. The Master came on a swell of lust and affection that startled him in their intensity, spilling into that sweet mouth and untouched mind. The Doctor, seeming not quite to know where he was anymore, slid off, licking his dry lips and looking up into the Master’s eyes. The Master touched his thumb to the corner of the Doctor’s mouth to catch a missed drop, pressed it to the Doctor’s parted lips, and shivered slightly when, staring at him with that blissful, lost expression, the Doctor kissed it off.  
  
“Come here,” the Master asked, and the Doctor straddled his chest again. The Master pushed the remnants of the Doctor’s shirt off, and with some feverish maneuvering his trousers joined the lump of clothing on the floor in short order. The Master’s gaze swept lingeringly over the Doctor’s exposed, exquisite body as he settled back down again. The Master selected two of the chords from his bundle and gave them short, sharp plucks, like overwrought bowstrings. The Doctor gave two answering cries, jerking against him, falling and catching himself on his elbows. He leaned over the Master, quivering, trying to catch his breath.   
  
“I could make you come like that,” the Master gloated a touch huskily, even as he found the nerve that sent such a signal within the Doctor’s mind and pressed down on it hard to forestall that event. “But I think I rather enjoy you like this,” he admitted, groping for and finding the salve and coating his own fingers with it.   
  
Suffused with afterglow, he prepared the Doctor with unaccustomed care, running a calming hand down his spine while with the other he worked another finger in. He took his time about it. The Doctor, trapped on the verge, tried to keep himself supported on his hands and knees above the Master. With perhaps an edge of cruelty, the Master drew it out, fucking the Doctor with his fingers until he whimpered. The Doctor’s virgin mind and body had already been dreadfully over-stimulated. He was so obviously, achingly aroused. But the Master seemed to have something of a  _thing_  for the Doctor’s distress.   
  
“Please,” the Doctor managed.  _“Please_ , ah, Master—”   
  
The Master guided the Doctor up and onto him. It was a marvel that even in his confusion the Doctor managed to get out the words “refractory period” in a questioning tone. The Master blinked, then chuckled.   
  
“One’s respiratory bypass proves exceptionally useful, my dear. It’s a schoolboy trick, I’ll explain it to you another time. There you are now,” he eased himself into the Doctor, settling the other man in his lap. He ran his hands up and down the Doctor’s back as the man squirmed and settled on his cock, letting one drift down to touch where he disappeared into the other man. “All right?” he asked, not without tenderness. The Doctor bit his lip and nodded, and the Master thrust up into him. The Doctor seemed to regain a measure of comprehension he bounced cautiously, establishing a rhythm his new body could handle.   
  
The Master hissed as the Doctor sped up. The Doctor rocked himself punishingly hard, desperate to come. The Master clawed his fingers into the Doctor’s arse, his head thrown back, his dark hair in sweaty disarray, his breath short. “Doctor,” he gasped, racked with the torturous pleasure of the tight, slick embrace of his body, at the way his mind, which the Master hadn’t been able to resist burying himself in once more, shuddered and clenched around his own velvet, filthy thoughts.  
  
The Doctor strained against the Master’s block until the Master’s self-control snapped and, suddenly, he released his hold. With a cry that was almost a scream, the Doctor came and slumped down, panting. The clutch of his body and the sudden forceful pull of his mind drew the Master along with him.   
  
The Doctor slumped down on top of him, thoroughly exhausted. After a few minutes hard breathing, he ventured, “That was lovely. Wasn’t that lovely? With the—string things. It was all very nice, thank you.”  
  
The Master laughed at his babbling. “Thank  _you_ , my dear. And yes, I suppose it was, though I’d have chosen a more enthusiastic adjective. You might consider ‘incredible.’”   
  
“Mm. Or we might prefer ‘fantastic.’” He dropped his lips to the Master's, clumsily licking the other man’s mouth open, sighing contentedly into a warm, drowsy kiss. The Doctor fell asleep not long after. The Master was equally sated, but more preoccupied. He shifted the Doctor, who had, amusingly enough, managed to lose consciousness on top of him, to the side. As he did so, he caught sight of the Doctor’s relaxed, peaceful expression. He was beautiful, the Master noted. Of course he’d known that, and the attraction between them would exist regardless of the Doctor’s current comeliness. But still he caught himself stroking back hair from the young face, almost reverently.  
  
***  
  
The Doctor was working towards a degree in revisionist history. He’d managed to thoroughly justify sleeping with the Master that first night. He’d never been with a member of his own species before, and thus he’d been curious. That was only natural and fair. The Master had taken advantage of his inexperience, manipulatively licking his neck as if it were an ice-lolly. How could the Doctor have been expected to resist that?  
  
The sex the next morning (he’d woken up to find himself being fucked, had gone along with it, had mentioned afterwards that he was late for work, had been told that would have been the case if he’d been going to work, and had then proceeded to ‘go along with it’ for a full day before sleeping in the Master’s bed again) had been an elaborate hangover from the first night. In any event he’d learned a great deal about telepathic sex, had babbled something incredibly embarrassing to the Master in a weak moment about having had no notion sex could  _be_  like this, and probably betrayed the whole humiliating ‘best of his life’ thing. But, now it was over, there was really no sound reason to do it again.   
  
He’d subsequently endured a tense, horrible day in the lab, during which people very pointedly did not comment on the fact that he and the Master had been jointly incommunicado with absolutely no explanation for very long time indeed. The Master had come in at lunchtime, apologetically explained that he had a meeting with an ambassador from the Traken Empire and couldn’t join the Doctor today, and had casually looked at what the Doctor had been doing with his morning. All of that would have been perfectly acceptable, but he’d done it with a hand wrapped peremptorily around the Doctor’s waist, in full view of anyone who cared to look, and the Doctor had had to hide in his office for the rest of the afternoon so they could all talk about him in peace.   
  
At the day’s end the Doctor had retired to his room to think. He lay on his narrow bed, staring at the gray ceiling and tried  _not_  to think things like, ‘the only way to learn how to do that trick of his with the chords is to get more practical experience in.’ Realistically, the Doctor was fairly sure he had gotten as much in him over the course of the last hours as ever needed to go there.  
  
The automatic door whisked open and the Master entered without knocking.  
  
“What are you doing in  _here_?” The Master gave the room a dismissive glance. “I’ve been hunting for you everywhere.”  
  
“Thinking,” the Doctor said with resolution. “And obviously not everywhere.”  
  
“Well, you’ve a study and a bedroom, either of which might be conducive to thought.” The Master sat down on the same chair he’d used to inform the Doctor that he was enslaved. The Doctor didn’t point out that this  _was_  his bedroom: apparently the Master thought two nights in his should have been enough to convince even the dimmest man that he’d switched residences. The Master raised an eyebrow at him. “You look decidedly serious, my dear. Is your work progressing poorly?”  
  
“I’m afraid I’m stuck at the moment,” the Doctor admitted, avoiding looking at the Master by fixing his gaze on a spot on the ceiling. “Slave labor can be so terribly aggravating, don’t you agree?” He was trying to force out ‘we have to talk,’ which should by all rights shortly followed by ‘and we can never do any of  _that_  ever again.’ He even intended to provide accompanying rationale. Any second now he’d manage to start.   
  
The Master ignored the attempt to goad him, generously attributing it to the Doctor’s frustration and excusing it in the same thought. “What a baleful expression,” he observed. “But, I have an idea to raise your sadly flagging spirits.” His hand had landed on the Doctor’s chest during their conversation, and now crept downwards, suggesting to the Doctor that this was not the full extent of the Master’s interest in raising things.   
  
‘Stop that and go.’ The Doctor rolled it around in his mind. Or perhaps ‘please stop touching me, I’m afraid I going to have to ask you to leave.’ Or even ‘so you molest your slaves as a matter of course, then?’  
  
“You should fuck me,” the Master murmured.  
  
The Doctor started and turned to look at him instantly. “I beg your pardon?”  
  
The Master smirked. “I’m certain it would cheer you up no end.”   
  
“It’s just,” the Doctor’s hand arrested the Master’s wrist, halting for a moment the light groping the Master was engaged in, “I’d received the distinct impression that you weren’t interested in allowing me any such privilege.”   
  
The Master grinned at him with the air of one who has discovered after years of assuming he had no sweet tooth that actually, the right flavor of ice cream is delightful. “Perhaps I’ve decided I find the idea intriguing, as long as it would be you doing it.”  
  
The Doctor looked away at the closed door, and thought of his TARDIS, probably pining for him even as he did for her, for his freedom. He thought about how essential escape was to his happiness. He thought about the Master lying back, hair dark against the sheets, eyes glazed, letting himself be fucked with long, slow strokes. Thought of how the Master might growl and buck his hips up into the thrusts, eager and demanding. Of whether, after he’d come enough times to be willing and wanton, he’d let the Doctor take him on his hands and knees, cursing him and begging him for more in the same harsh, strained breath. The Doctor found himself swallowing, and saying, “I haven’t anything here, and the bedroom’s more comfortable.”  
  
“Infinitely so,” the Master agreed, watching with some amusement as the Doctor stood and buttoned his coat over the incriminating result of his efforts.  
  
***  
  
He had been, the Master thought, an idiot to believe his fascination with the Doctor could be exorcised, or even that it should be. He’d suspected as much when he’d felt compelled to come to the Doctor to apologize for his behavior. No one else in memory had managed to earn his sincere contrition—and for his actions themselves, not simply because their consequences had turned out not to his liking.   
  
He was shocked at how quickly the Doctor was growing as a psychic—too proud and enchanted to even feel threatened by the realization that if the Doctor applied himself, his powers might one day rival the Master’s own. The creativity and endless adaptability that made the Doctor such an apt pupil resulted in both psychic and physical sex so ‘fantastic’ it was almost difficult to credit. In addition to nearly obliterating the Master’s memory of any previous partners with his consummate mastery of any acts they might have performed, the Doctor had even managed to make the Master  _crave_  submission to his own desire, heedless of the indignity of it, of the Doctor’s force, left capable only of aching with want. It felt undeniably right to have the Doctor in his home, at his table, in his bed, at his right hand. The Master had always been justifiably confident in his own abilities, but with the Doctor at his side, he might well be unstoppable.   
  
The Doctor rarely whinged about his enslavement anymore, rarely pressed and prodded the Master about his TARDIS. As a result the Master rarely had to lie to him about it, and he discretely avoided mentioning those decisions occasioned by affairs of state which his too-tender consort would find it difficult to understand or forgive. His past and the dark rumors that swirled around it soured the Doctor’s enjoyment of their union, the Master could tell, but the Doctor  _must_  come in time to forget all of that. In future the Master would have to be humane when it was at all convenient and discrete when it wasn’t. What the Doctor didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.   
  
And now, when a tiny cloud of potential discord hovered over their bliss, the Master would be calm. Collected. He would hint, subtly—he’d been  _good_  at subtlety for whole centuries now.  
  
The Doctor came out of the bathroom wearing the cobalt blue pajamas the Master had given him as a sort of present the week before. He laid down, his body facing the bed’s edge. The silence lasted a moment. Another. Then the words came tumbling out of the Master’s mouth, unstoppable as an avalanche of social awkwardness.  
  
“I trust you understand that I expect monogamy?”  
  
The Doctor rolled towards the Master and blinked at him. Then comprehension dawned and he groaned, seizing a free pillow and pressing his face into it. “Oh for god’s sake—”   
  
The Master bristled. “I think it’s a more than reasonable demand.”  
  
“Oh, of  _course_  it is,” the Doctor’s exasperated voice was muffled by the pillow. Irritated, he tossed the pillow at the Master, who deftly caught it and threw it over his shoulder and onto the floor. “Why you would even ask— She’s a pleasant woman—a friend of  _yours_ , I might add, and one you seemed to particularly think I’d like—and, yes, you know me well, I did like her, very much. She’s interesting, and gifted in her field, but I am  _not_  going to throw myself at Professor Summerfield the moment you turn your back on me. Of all the ridiculous accusations—”  
  
“I’ve accused you of nothing,” the Master corrected him. “I merely wanted to be sure we were agreed. And Summerfield is not my ‘friend’. She’s a freelance professional I happen to know via our occasional contracts.”  
  
“That distasteful, verbose Mister Glitz is a ‘freelance professional,’ as you call it, as is the equally unpleasant Mister Arkadian. However, Professor Linme, for example, is your  _friend._ Professor Summerfield is your very good friend, who only bothered to come head up your dig because your letter was disgustingly charming, and as a favor to you.  _I_  am also your friend, in case you suffer from a more general delusion of sinister inapproachability.”  
  
“We’re lovers,” the Master waved a hand dismissively, “which is far from friendship.” He gave the Doctor a suspicious look. “Unless you regularly share a bed with your ‘friends.’” He started to quickly reconsider the now-alarming number of traveling companions the Doctor had mentioned over the course of their short acquaintance.   
  
The Doctor looked positively scandalized. “You know very well I do nothing of the kind! And yes, we’re, er, ‘lovers,’ I suppose, but we’re also—why am I even arguing this inane point with you?”  
  
“Your insufferable compulsion to be right,” the Master supplied.   
  
The Doctor huffed. “Thank you, Pot, I’ll keep that in mind.” He sighed and decided that if any maturity was to enter this conversation, he was going to have to be the one to bring it. “How did you meet Professor Summerfield? It’s not as if you’ve had a great deal of contact with humans.”  
  
And so the Master sat up against the headboard and told him about how Bernice Summerfield had first come to his attention whist trying to steal one of his favorite frescoes. She had been having a difficult time attempting to remove it without damaging it, and had concluded she should just take the entire wall to be safe. The Master had observed her for a few minutes unobserved, admired her industry, and had her thrown in the dungeons. He’d interviewed her after she’d spent what he felt to be an appropriate length of time stewing in the dark, whereupon the Master discovered that Professor Summerfield had been sent to abscond with the work and bring it back to a certain art Collection.   
  
She thought she was on a prearranged, paid contract, business as usual—her rather manipulative employer had neglected to mention that she would in fact be robbing the Emperor of Hestin. Which was, if the Master did say so himself, an incredibly stupid way to try and earn a living. Unbeknownst to her, her employer had slipped a perception filter about her person to make the operation proceed smoothly, but naturally when the Master was informed the security system had detected an intruder in his private rooms he wanted to see the individual, and his will to do so overcame her employer’s precautions.  
  
“I recognized her name as that of a preeminent scholar who’d written a fascinating, if completely incorrect, paper on Martian feudalism. I was side-tracked by a discussion of the feudal Martian clergy for some hours, but Professor Summerfield mentioned that intriguing as all this was, she’d become quite hungry. I released her, had the cook make her up a parcel of sandwiches, and sent her on her way. Without the fresco, of course, but not,” the Master chuckled, “empty handed.”  
  
“You mean the sandwiches-”  
  
“The sandwiches,” the Master agreed, “as well as a gene-coded bomb addressed to her employer I’d hidden underneath the Coronation Chicken. It didn’t eliminate him, more’s the pity, but neither did I receive any further uninvited guests from that source. She eventually forgave me after a falling out with her then-employer and a rather memorable occasion on which I spared a moment to save her from annihilation at the tentacles of the Doom Warblers of Koot. I occasionally have need of a qualified archeologist, and Miss Summerfield perpetually has need of enough cash to ensure the safe arrival of her next vodka tonic.”  
  
The Doctor proped himself up on his elbows, his eyes bright with amusement. “A fascinating paper on Martian feudalism, you say? I didn’t know you read archeology journals.”   
  
The Master’s expression grew guarded. “I follow the field a little.”  
  
“Rubbish. You read professional-caliber journals, and can even recall the names of active luminaries in the field. You love it, don’t you?”   
  
“I  _dabble_ ,” the Master insisted, because it was undignified and embarrassing to admit his fascination with the artifacts and belief systems of ancient cultures.  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous. I think it’s charming,” the Doctor smiled at him. “Especially given that you might just go experience what they’re writing about first hand. What about it do you find so compelling?”  
  
The Master considered, and said, grudgingly, “I suppose I enjoyed the shifting perceptions of archeologists from disparate eras. The process of discovery, the stitching together of narrative, the imposition of coherence. Naturally I value first hand experience of the peoples in question, but one cannot fail to appreciate the lens of the historical process—its capacity to reveal or invent insights and explanations that one doesn’t readily arrive at whilst engaging with a society in the fullness of its prime. I find it a rewarding supplement to what knowledge I’ve gleaned over the centuries.”   
  
The Doctor looked at him with palpable warm fondness, and the Master thought that perhaps there was nothing he could say to this man that wouldn’t be met with a perfect sympathy of understanding. The Doctor leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. He didn’t usually initiate their encounters, and the Master luxuriated in the feel of soft lips against his own, in the twist of tongue, the closeness, the way the Doctor’s hand splayed against the back of his head, fingers toying with his hair. The Doctor pulled back, with a parting peck to his lips.  
  
“Now that’s cleared up, you should have Bernice over for dinner again while she’s on the planet. I enjoy her company as a pleasant acquaintance who could become a friend. And for the record, I’m not inclined towards anything other than monogamous liaisons, I never really have been. Though perhaps you might take it on faith that I’m not exactly prone to casual encounters.”  
  
“Good,” the Master said, satisfaction lacquering the word. The criticisms of his capacity for trust he completely ignored. He  _did_  trust the Doctor—after all, wasn’t the man walking around with his wrists and neck bare? Even so, he’d been perfectly sensible to make his position clear.   
  
“You’re very appealing when you’re being clever and invested.” The Doctor coughed and looked down at the bedspread.  
  
The Master took the Doctor’s chin in his hand and lifted his head up to meet his gaze. “Oh am I, my dear?”  
  
“Yes,” the Doctor breathed, “I’d say so.”  
  
“I’m glad to hear it,” the Master smirked, drawing him into another kiss.  
  
***  
  
Novelty died out as a plausible excuse. The Doctor entered a sort of oblivious trance, willfully ignorant of his own ever-deepening involvement in what had, without his entirely comprehending the metamorphosis, outstripped a mutual fixation, an arrangement of convenience, or means of satisfying lust and curiosity. The Doctor was now suffering a very specific sort of temporarily amnesia, and couldn’t remember the affront to his morals an alliance with the Emperor would otherwise have caused.   
  
His equanimity was shaken when he noted an element of danger. An indication that perhaps emotion had become involved, and that the situation might have gotten somewhat out of hand.  
  
At the Master’s suggestion, the Doctor had sound-proofed his new office. One night, long after everyone else had gone home, the Master found him still there, attempting to iron out the problems with his terraforming project. Surely it was past time for the Doctor to put aside his intellectual vanity and come to bed? They bickered over it until the Master felt compelled to force his point. If the Doctor wouldn’t come to bed, bed could easily be made to come to him, and to prove it he fucked the Doctor over a lab table. The Master hoped this would instill in the Doctor some notion of the consequences of treating his Master as if he were a demanding housewife.   
  
“What’s funny?” the Doctor asked afterwards, perching on the desk, arching his back to ease the strain.  
  
“I wanted you over this table from almost the beginning of our acquaintance,” the Master admitted, as the Doctor lazily draped his arms around the Master’s neck. “Possibly because you can be so damned irritating if given something to be  _right_  about.”  
  
“You eroticize laboratories in a somewhat disturbing manner,” the Doctor told him.   
  
The Master made a dismissive noise. “My dear Doctor, please be reasonable. I wanted to fuck you before you donned that fetching labcoat. When you first pitched yourself into my arms, in fact,” he corrected. “The rest came later, in due course.”  
  
The Doctor frowned slightly at the suggestion of ‘the rest,’ but was distracted by the Master leering at him. “Now say ‘eroticize’ again. When you talk of sex it sounds so deliciously transgressive—you blush even now, my dear. I find the pretense of innocence especially charming, considering that not ten minutes ago you were whimpering and begging me to take you harder.”  
  
The Doctor gave him a look and then primly ignored him. The Master turned his dark head to kiss the Doctor’s wrists as the Doctor protested, “I don’t believe you. I was so ill, you can’t possibly have wanted to do anything but hand me a cool towel with which to mop my fevered brow.”  
  
“You were flushed, attractive and throwing yourself into my arms! I’m not made of stone.”  
  
“No, you apparently even find dizziness and fainting arousing.”  
  
“It was an idle fancy,” the Master dismissed his barb. “I only entertained serious designs on you when I came to know you better.” He gave the Doctor a proper kiss to demonstrate the biblical degree of his current knowledge of the man. “When did you first consider me?” He arched an eyebrow.  
  
The Doctor tried to think back. Perhaps when they’d fought off the coup together. Or had it grown more subtly than that? But he kept landing on that hot, close tent. On his dizzy conviction that the man before him could provide him with comfort and safety, a feeling of familiarity and calm.   
  
“I imagine I might have known, atemporally,” the Doctor said quietly. “‘The very threshold of revelation. Sometimes you can see things.’”  
  
The Master nodded. The veil of time was stretched thinnest near a regeneration; such brushes with strange truths were not unheard of. The Doctor’s admission conferred a pleasing sense of destiny to their meeting, which the Master found appropriate. The Doctor, unique in all the worlds, had carved for himself a niche in the Master’s life, which only he was fit to fill. It was fitting that their first encounter was as uncommon as the man himself.   
  
***  
  
But those two suspicious words, ‘the rest,’ had alerted the Doctor to a possible problem. Over the next weeks he noted that there might indeed be something to them.   
  
There was a degree of fervor in the way the Master looked at him in bed, and even at odd moments during the day. That  _look_  flattered, heated and frightened the Doctor. The Master’s myriad small gestures of attention and consideration all served as evidence against him. He brought a special intensity into their bed, so that what they did seemed almost to be creeping into lovemaking. The Doctor was ever more unable to ignore the signs, and to convince himself that he was just being paranoid. As time wore on, and the Doctor still hadn’t any idea where his TARDIS might be (not, he admitted in his more self-aware moments, that he had been searching for it as diligently as he could and really should have been), he grew surer that the Master cared for him intensely.  
  
This was at odds with the Doctor’s comfortable assumption that he was engaged in a dalliance with an incredibly experienced dictator. A man not given to emotional attachment, whose feelings for the Doctor, if indeed he could claim any, must lack depth, and would be of short duration.   
  
The Doctor forcibly kept himself from considering whether he might himself be emotionally involved. It was immaterial. He had never had much sympathy for the people he met in his travels who claimed to be deeply in love with gangsters or murders or what have you because their feelings had entirely overwhelmed their judgment.. Love was a complicit act. You had to articulate it. It had an intellectual existence as well as an emotional dimension. ‘Love’ didn’t properly count unless you admitted the condition and chose to act upon it accordingly. How could you be ‘in love’ with someone whose actions you found reprehensible and repellent?   
  
And so, while he might be in something of a long-term  _embroilment_  of dubious morality and sanity with the Emperor of Hestin, it wasn’t anything of  _that_  sort. As soon as he found his TARDIS, the Doctor would bid the Master a fond farewell. While he’d undoubtedly be very cross initially at having been defied and losing the Doctor as a scientist and bed-mate, the Doctor felt certain the Master would understand in some little time. Giving up the Master’s friendship and society altogether would be unpleasant, not to say painful, but his life would go on. Soon everything would be as if he’d never taken the better part of an Earth year off to play house with a murderous megalomaniac (who sometimes looked down at the Doctor while he was inside him in such a way that the Doctor felt as if he could never be better loved by anyone else).

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Master suggests commitment. / In which the Doctor apologizes.

The Crane Wife   
Chapter 6, Part I  
  
  
The Master had been thinking recently about dynastic succession. Actually, he’d been thinking recently about particle/wave light structure duality; how best to capitalize on a neighboring planet’s failing grain market; whether the Doctor could be seduced into trying fisting; what, if any, difference there was between ‘jam’ and ‘marmalade;’ whether the Doctor might know the distinction; and a few thousand other subjects besides, but not least among them had been the topic of dynastic succession.   
  
The Monin Host were politely questioning the Master as to how a long-term contract they wished to enter into with him would be honored in the event of his death. They understood that, as he was a Time Lord, that unfortunate event might be very far off, but the Monin Host were not in the business of trading in optimism. Had the Master chosen a successor, and could that individual be depended upon to maintain order and to uphold any contractual obligations the Master’s government had agreed to?   
  
The Master had asked for a brief recess in their ongoing negotiations before he presented the Host with relevant information. Truthfully, he had no relevant information to give them. It wasn’t that he was ridiculously short-sighted — the Empire  _was_  well-structured enough not to collapse into anarchy with his death. He simply hadn’t wanted to name a successor from among his political supporters. Such an act would make that individual more vulnerable, and seemed intolerably peremptory when the Master expected to live a good deal longer, potentially outliving any potential successor he could name. But the Host had a point. He himself didn’t make long-term contracts with governmental systems whose mechanisms weren’t transparent to him.  
  
He spent the day thinking on it, idly drumming his fingers on every surface he walked past. At lunch, the Doctor, sitting next to him, tolerated this for seven seconds before he seized the offending hand with his own and began rubbing the over-wrought tendons. The Master blinked. He hadn’t even realized he’d been ceaselessly tapping their silver wood dining table.   
  
“I’ve the strangest intuition something might be troubling you,” the Doctor said wryly.   
  
The Master chuckled. “Do you recall those contraband diagrams Arkadian brought me? More particularly the ones which detailed the impressive engines the Monin Host have developed?”  
  
“Mm,” the Doctor took up the Master’s other hand and performed the same operation. “Difficult to forget. I believe you started to fantasize about reconverting the engine to build the same sort of planetary shielding system around your core world Gallifrey has, using the engine as an anchor in place of the Eye of Harmony. I’d still like a look at the power-core, I can’t believe they were getting that kind of output to stabilize.”  
  
The Master’s thumb traced circles on the top of the Doctor’s hand, pressing against the sweet hollow of the thenar space — a valley sloping down from the pronounced metacarpal of his forefinger. The slightest abuse of the vulnerable flesh just here would have the Doctor gasping in pain, yet the Doctor gave his hands, himself, over to the Master, trusting that no harm could possibly come to him from that source. The Master found the Doctor’s blithe, trusting naïveté both foolish and dear, though in this instance he was perfectly correct.   
  
“How charmingly attentive you are, Doctor. The Host have declined to provide us with an example of their technology unless I agree to shelter them under a long-term protection agreement, as I do a number of their neighbors. However, even if I made them such an offer, they’re consumed with worry that, in the event of my death, any arrangement I might have made with them would be rendered valueless. They suggest, as have a number of my advisers for some time now, that I produce an heir.”   
  
In what the Master would later bitterly remember as a deeply ironic gesture, the Doctor dropped his hand.  
  
“I should get back to work.” The Doctor stood.   
  
“You’ve barely begun your lunch.” The Master gestured to the plate in front of the Doctor. It contained an untouched half of a cucumber sandwich, and another semi-sandwich with just four of the Doctor’s small, neat bites missing.   
  
“Can’t talk, critical stage of the project, must dash, lovely sandwiches!” The Doctor fluttered out the door, dashed back to grab his abandoned hat and shove it on his head, and then was gone again.   
  
“But you’re only doing paperwork today,” the Master called after him, bemused.   
  
***  
  
  
An hour after Linme had begged exhaustion and toddled homewards, the Doctor finally completed the blasted paperwork. He sighed and stepped back from the lab table he’d been working at with an air of relief — directly into the waiting embrace of his lover, who had somehow crept up behind the Doctor without him noticing.   
  
“Doctor,” the Master nipped his earlobe, “I’ve a proposal for you.”  
  
“Mm,” the Doctor leaned back, “what sort of proposal did you have in mind?”  
  
“What do you mean ‘what sort of proposal?’ Abruptly the Master stepped back, and the Doctor turned around to face him. “A  _proposal!_ ” The Master’s tone was harsh with nervous exasperation.   
  
Conventional wisdom among their people dictated that a relationship should survive a regeneration intact before the couple in question attempted to make a long-term commitment. The Master had spent only the better part of a year with the Doctor—no time at all to Lords of it. However, the Doctor was nearly new-born into his current body and the Master’s embarrassing accident on Keeper Tremas’s staircase (he avoided mentioning both the event and the humiliating regeneration imprinting that had followed) had only preceded the Doctor’s regeneration by a handful of years. He could of course rush the process out of convenience, but it seemed such a waste when he was content as he was, and when he found the Doctor’s present incarnation exquisite in every detail. Even attributes as ultimately trivial as his current physical features held ample charm. It seemed ludicrous to wait for the decades or centuries that would probably pass before their next regenerations to publicly claim the Doctor as his own.   
  
It would also be politically inconvenient. Treating the Doctor as if he were unworthy of official recognition for the next several decades would ultimately undermine the Doctor’s political legitimacy and credibility. If a lingering air of disrespectability hovered around the Doctor it could prove difficult to dislodge when the time came to invest him with all the power due the Emperor’s legitimate chosen. Best to avoid it altogether.   
  
The Doctor paled: It seemed he was equally agitated. “ _What?_ Now look here, I—”  
  
The Doctor was clever, he must have expected this. The Master found that reassuring, because it made them companions in the stupid distress of the moment they had finally arrived at. That was fine—what couldn’t he bear, with the Doctor to share it?   
  
The Master seized the Doctor by the shoulders. “You are the most remarkable man I’ve ever met. There is, of course, no room for preordination in a rational cosmology, but I find rationality denatured—matched and overruled by the very fact of your existence, and your presence here. I believe we know our minds. I already think of you as my consort. We need only publicize our union abroad.”   
  
“Oh dear,” the Doctor said faintly.   
  
“Marry me.” The Master murmured, kissing him as if it sealed a contract.  
  
“Mmph!” The Doctor, surprised, pushed the Master back by the shoulders, his teeth firmly clamped shut against any possible incursion of the Master’s tongue. Forcing the Master back a few inches, the Doctor grasped the nearest point, hoping to arrest the asteroid of consequences hurtling towards him. “I am not  _marrying_  you to satisfy the Monin Host and clench your contract.”   
  
The Master scoffed, stepping back and crossing his arms over his chest. “My dear Doctor, forget the Host. You cannot think I would suggest something this important merely to facilitate a trade agreement.”  
  
“You might,” the Doctor persisted, “if it were expedient.”  
  
“But I’m hardly likely to treat matters that concern  _us_  so lightly!” the Master argued, indignant at the suggestion. “The Host’s complaints brought to my attention that the time had come to celebrate a marriage, but no more than that. Put the Monin and their ridiculous craft from your mind as thoroughly as I have done.” The Master grinned at him. “I should infinitely prefer it if, for the time being, you thought only of me.”  
  
The Doctor shoved his hands in his coat pockets defensively. “Forgive me if I’m finding it difficult to forget that you’re the Emperor just at this moment.”   
  
The Master’s expression was perplexed, then indulgent. “Is it that you find the disparity between our relative positions disturbing?  _Doctor,_ ” he tsked, “I cannot allow such trifles to stand in our way. Perhaps it would ease your mind to have something entirely your own. You need only ask, and I’ll make you an engagement present of a star system. Of any number of them. Even,” he smiled, “unto half my kingdom. I would prefer, however, to formally name you my consort upon our wedding. Your power would then be identical to my own. You need never fear I think of you as anything less than entirely my equal.”  
  
“No,” the Doctor fidgeted, distressed. “You don’t understand. I want to  _see_  the universe, not rule it.”  
  
“Don’t be naïve,” the Master laughed. “What do you think you’ve been helping me to do these last months?”   
  
The Doctor grit his teeth. “Whatever I’ve been coerced into doing, whatever collusion I might have succumbed to out of weakness, I assure you I’ll be more careful in future. I don’t want anything you can give me. Keep your star systems, I don’t need them.”  
  
The Master arched an eyebrow.. “So you’re mine for the asking, without any such bribery?”  
  
“I don’t recall having said anything of the kind.” The Doctor took a step back, hips hitting the table, and the Master stepped forward with him, intent on maintaining the distance between them.  
  
“My dear Doctor, be reasonable. I’ll give you anything in creation, should you require or request it. Though I must admit, I never thought you so materialistic.” The Master smiled teasingly, obviously baiting him. “That isn’t intended as criticism—far from it. You look charming in greed, and there’s something delicious in your ambition.” He chuckled. “Perhaps I’ve spoilt you.”  
  
The Doctor bristled and came to a decision. “Anything in creation, you said?”  
  
“I did, pet.” The Master dropped the indulgent endearment to provoke the Doctor into making a fantastic demand—the more ridiculous, the greater his victory would be when he managed to deliver it. He was enjoying the pleasurable escalation of tension, the prospect of a rewarding struggle, of the exquisite conquest and the sublime consummation only the Doctor could provide him.  
  
“All right. I want you to give me my liberty.” The Doctor’s voice was level, his expression direct.  
  
“You-” the Master started. “what?”   
  
“I think you heard me.”  
  
It was possible that this was a joke in poor taste, but nothing in the Doctor’s face hinted at flirtatious challenge   
  
“You can’t intend to  _leave_ ,” the Master said, without knowing what to make of such an absurd statement.   
  
“If I wanted to, yes, exactly that,” the Doctor said. “To do whatever I like, and to go wherever I please, which is, unless I’m much mistaken, the whole point of having one’s freedom.”  
  
“If you want a pleasure jaunt, it can be easily arranged. Anywhere you choose, Doctor,” the Master offered, beginning to grasp that the Doctor’s unease was something more troubling than the mirror of his own tension, but still unable to grasp or define the problem. “We’ll go wherever you wish, for as long as you like. We needn’t marry immediately, if you’d prefer to have time to grow accustomed to the prospect.”  
  
The Doctor gave him a pained look. “No,” he said, quietly. “No. I don’t want escorted somewhere by a flock of hidden guards intended to ‘protect’ me. I don’t want to be kept at your side on a short leash, like your  _pet_ , as you so charmingly put it. You don’t understand. It’s not a matter of giving me time, of placating me with gifts, as if I were a child. I’m giving you my answer. No. No to any of it, to all of it.   
  
“I’m sorry, but I could never have said otherwise. I never meant for—” The Doctor stopped, trying to arrange his thoughts. “I think it’s best I leave. You offered me anything. I’m asking for my freedom.”  
  
“Absolutely not,” the Master answered automatically, his gut dropping at the Doctor’s suggestion. “How can you even—how can you fail to comprehend that what I’m offering you is infinitely more profound than what either of us  _intended_ , than the life you formerly led? How can you love me as you do and suggest something so foolish?”   
  
“I beg your pardon?” The Doctor looked shocked, paper-pale. “I most certainly do not! How dare you just presume I—I never claimed to—to,” his voice faltered slightly, “ _love_  you.”  
  
“Some things are so sublimely obvious they hardly require articulation,” the Master said, cold and unyielding. “I assumed you understood what you are to me. An imbecile could discern the nature of our attachment,” the Master hissed, crossing his arms. “What is it you propose to do if you should manage to ‘escape’ me? Do you intend to crawl into the nearest functioning TARDIS and run back to the life you knew? To forget you were ever bound to me?”   
  
“My life was hardly meaningless before you enslaved me, and I imagine we’ll be able to put all of this behind us soon after I return to it. I take it you don’t intend to release me?” The Doctor’s tone was polite, wry. The Master nearly shook with rage and could trust himself to say nothing. “No, I thought not,” the Doctor said. “Excuse me.” He pushed his way around the Master, deftly avoiding coming into contact with the man. He shut his office door behind him and left the lab.   
  
The Master was left alone in the well-equipped office he’d given the Doctor. Indicator lights from the line of high-end equipment he’d purchased especially for the man’s use flashed, cast dancing patterns across his expressionless face. Red, then blue as the cooling cycles flipped on. Dramatic against his sickly pale skin, playing in chiaroscuro across his dark hair and beard.  
  
A Time Lord’s conception of his element is endlessly adaptable and achingly flawless, but still the Master couldn’t say precisely how long he stood there. Without his being consciously aware of it, it was as if he were waiting for the scene to break, for it all to have been a grotesque illusion, a nightmare that had run its course and would end at any moment. He’d bubble up through the gloaming dark, into the welcome clarity of consciousness, where the daylight world was ordered and sensible. Where what was most precious to the Master would never think of ripping away from him, harshly enough to leave blood welling at the tear.   
  
He waited.  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
He’d expected the Doctor would come to bed—if not that night, then the next. He didn’t, and when the Master returned from a conference the day after that he discovered the Doctor’s clothes and effects missing from the bureau given over to his use—as though the Doctor had waited for that opportunity. Their rooms were naked, stripped of the Doctor’s books and his projects, which had lain scattered across the suite’s various surfaces for the past nine months.  
  
The Master had often needled the Doctor about his personal expression of the universal tendency to entropy. Any space he inhabited grew exponentially more disordered. Now everything was clean and hateful. The cleaning staff had changed the sheets, and the bed smelled of soap and chemical-fresia from the softener. It was as if the Doctor had never lived here. It was as it would be if he escaped, the Master thought darkly. How could the Doctor imagine doing such a thing to him? To himself?  
  
The Doctor must have moved back into that ridiculous little room. He must have actually been serious when he’d suggested they not see each other. It was cowardly and enraging of the Doctor to deny him an official union, but it was  _unfathomable_  to keep himself separate and apart here, while they slept only a few floors apart, when their lives were so exquisitely intertwined as to be inextricable.  
  
The Master reeked of unhappiness. He verbally savaged anyone who displayed the slightest incompetence in his service, and at the same time he seemed distracted, to have lost something of his verve.   
  
On the third night alone he failed to sleep entirely. Close to morning, he shrugged on his dressing gown, unlocked his ‘closet’ and walked deep into it, brushing aside overcoats until he stood in his console room facing the Doctor’s TARDIS. The Master took the second TARDIS key from the ring he kept in the puzzle box on his bureau and unlocked the door. When he’d first found him, the Doctor had worn the key around his neck like a talisman, but it had been easy enough to slip it off him while he was still suffering from regeneration sickness.   
  
The Master had explored the ship more thoroughly as his fascination with the Doctor increased. He’d become increasingly eager to know the Doctor—every detail of his past, every triviality and omission. Who he was when the Master wasn’t watching. Everyone he’d been.  
  
With perfect confidence he made his way to the Doctor’s bedroom, drew back the counterpane, slipped out of his dressing gown and into the bed. That was better. The sheets smelled of cologne the Master had never known this Doctor to wear, but it was nonetheless comforting on a primitive, sensual level. He picked up the book on the bedside table and read it from where the Doctor had used what appeared to be a Midskari phoenix feather as a bookmark until he fell asleep.  
  
***   
  
The Doctor acted as though nothing was wrong so aggressively that his distress was obvious. In the over-brittle brightness of his voice, in the stress and tension lurking around his eyes, which furrowed tight lines there. His ‘I’m fine’ was quick as thought and sharp enough to cut. His coworkers, Professor Linme included, were bright enough not to ask him why their employer avoided his entire lab, sending written orders or instructing Linme via the com channel. The general conclusion of their private gossip was that the couple in question had engaged in similar dramatics before, and that this one was only another spat of the same. What more could it be, given their obvious mutual attachment?  
  
It had been four days since he’d so much as seen the Master, and he got to the lab early, before anyone else, because he was tired of hearing himself think—the same circles, over and again, the same self-recriminations and desperate denials, pacing paths into trenches, accomplishing nothing and benefiting no one, all as involuntary as a leg jerking when a rubber hammer tapped the knee.   
  
He’d been working for less than a quarter of an hour when he looked up at the sound of his door opening, visibly paled, and swallowed.  
  
“You’ve been hiding from me, Doctor. I almost find that more insulting than your spurning my advances.” The Master shut the door behind himself, slatted the blinds closed and came to stand in front of the Doctor’s desk.   
  
“As I’m not permitted even to leave the palace grounds, I’d hardly call it hiding.” The Doctor leaned back and endeavored to look disaffected, staring vaguely past the Master’s face so that he wouldn’t have to look him in the eye.  
  
The Master sneered, dismissing the reproach as the avoidance it was. “No, of course not. Dodging, perhaps. Cowering?”  
  
“Try ‘innocuously keeping to myself,’” the Doctor corrected, raising a cool eyebrow. “Why are you here now? You’ve done anything  _but_  seek me out these past days.”  
  
“Disappointed, my dear?” the Master shot back.   
  
The Doctor colored. “Hardly,” he muttered, looking down at the papers on his desk blotter.  
  
The Master came around the desk, gathered the papers the Doctor had been staring at, briskly straightened them and moved them aside, sitting where they’d been. The Doctor raised his eyes to the Master’s face to avoid looking directly at the man’s groin.   
  
“So you  _can_  make eye contact,” the Master praised sarcastically.  
  
“And you’ve come to bicker. Good to see you getting out, Master, but really, couldn’t we have done this over the vidcom?”  
  
“No, Doctor,” the Master said, more soberly. “I haven’t come to argue with you over trivialities. And furthermore, I’ve no intention of renewing the offers which were so disgusting to you the other day.” He paused a moment before beginning again. “My opinion has not altered. I still think you are, for reasons I do not fully comprehend, being incredibly foolish. Nevertheless, this is intolerable. I will, for the time being,” he stressed the conditionality of his magnanimity, gritting his teeth, “endeavor to forget your behavior.”   
  
The Doctor frowned. “It’s not simply—about that question. I meant every objection I made to—this. Some of the jumbled signals are my fault, I’m afraid,” he sighed. “But it really is best for both of us if we give it up full stop.”  
  
“Given your behavior, Doctor, I don’t believe you can have any idea of or interest in what’s best for me,” the Master countered, which hurt rather more than the Doctor had expected it to.  
  
He swallowed. “Perhaps I deserved that. For what it’s worth, I  _am_  sorry, but you’re hardly blameless in this—”  
  
“So you’ve said, but I’m afraid your apologies are worth very little to me." His eyes narrowed as he considered the Doctor. "'Jumbled signals,'"he scoffed. "You  _never_  gave the slightest indication that you were displeased with any aspect of our liaison. Were you perhaps looking for a pretext to end it? I wouldn’t have expected such duplicity of you, but then, I’d hardly have expected  _this._ ”  
  
“No!” the Doctor’s denial was too hot, too emphatic, jarring with his affected detachment. “I wasn’t, you know I wasn’t. That’s not—not the problem. What we—it was pleasant, certainly, and I don’t regret all of it, but it shouldn’t and can’t go on, and it’s no use talking about it or pretending otherwise.”  
  
“It was  _‘pleasant’?_  You  _‘don’t regret all of it’?_ ” the Master repeated, incredulous.  
  
The Doctor adjusted his collar uncomfortably and tried to change the subject to anything other than his very poor choice of words. “Please don’t avoid the laboratory facilities on my account, as I think you have been. It  _is_  your lab, after all, I wouldn’t want you to feel uncomfortable—”  
  
“You ‘wouldn’t want’—you  _vile,_  self-righteous little  _bastard_! Next I suppose you’ll say you ‘bear me no ill’ will, and that you ‘hope I’ll have a nice life’!” The Master gawped at him.  
  
“That sounds along the right lines, yes,” the Doctor said weakly, assuring himself that if ‘having a nice life’ meant the Master immediately replaced him, he would be absolutely fine with that. Well. If not ‘fine,’ per se, that he would keep calm and carry on, as it were.   
  
The Master leaned forward, furious, seemingly intending either to say something  _really_  cutting or to kiss the Doctor until he had to admit that he hadn’t been able to sleep properly in days, was twitching for lack of the sex he’d grown so accustomed to, was incredibly bored, lonely and generally miserable without him. The Doctor was afraid of both possibilities, but luckily for him they were interrupted, and he never had to find out which was in the offing.  
  
“Doctor, I was wondering if you knew Assistant Stassi had sent you lemon squares? It’s just they’re sitting in the kitchen and Doctor Flekkur asked if they were for  _everyone,_  and I said I’d ask-”—Linme looked up from the schedule he’d been browsing while addressing the Doctor. “oh dear.”  
  
“This isn’t over,” the Master hissed at the Doctor, wheeling and stalking out. Linme skittered out of his way like a frightened beetle. The Doctor watched him go. He winced at the slam of the door.  
  
“So you’re, er, speaking again?” Linme tried, tentatively cheerful. “That seems like good news—”  
  
“I’m going to lunch,” the Doctor interrupted him, gathering his things.  
  
Linme checked his chronometer. “A few hours early, isn’t it?”   
  
“I’m going to lunch  _for the rest of the day._ ” The Doctor clarified and left, ignoring as best he could the discreet stares of all the lab techs who’d watched the Master storm out not a minute ago. Leaving now looked an awful lot like following him, even to the Doctor. With determination he veered towards his cell of a room, determined to conduct his pacing and worrying unobserved.  
  
***  
  
The Master had so much scheduled that day that he didn’t have any time to confront the Doctor again. He concentrated as best he could on his agenda, but all day long a ribbon of resentment wound sinuously through the back of his mind, growing ever harder to ignore.   
  
Was it possible he’d managed to delude himself? Had he only imagined the Doctor’s passion, and his deeper interest, because he craved reciprocation? No, impossible—the Doctor’s responsiveness had exceeded anything he might have dreamed. The most desperate mind couldn’t have invented the Doctor’s rapt, adoring expression, or the careful, undeniable tenderness of his hands and his gaze when he took the Master. The way the Doctor bit his lower lip when he was restraining himself from going too fast, from hurting him. The way, breathing hard, the Doctor touched him afterwards. He would run his hands over the Master’s body as though he were proud of how well his lover had done, dipping into the Master’s mind as though he were swimming in him, luxuriating in his partner with the smug satisfaction of a cat sunning itself, with the unselfconscious delight of a child at play.   
  
Neither had the Doctor been deliberately deceiving him to curry favor or ease his escape—a game that would have spiraled out of control when the Master developed more serious intentions towards him. It wouldn’t have occurred to even the most capable liar to hint that he preferred the Master’s hair worn loose, and then, when the Master failed to accede to his preference, to passive-aggressively hide his hair gel and then deny that he’d done any such thing. That particular brand of petty manipulation was exclusively employed between people who cared for each other.  
  
They’d fallen hand in hand, tumbling together. They’d been intoxicated by each other’s enchantment, even as with they had been with each other’s several charms. How  _dare_  the Doctor. How dare the Doctor look him in the eye and say he’d felt nothing, that their relationship had been merely an accident of circumstance, and a  _regrettable_  one, at that? Anger swelled in the Master like a tide coming in as the hours passed. Heartsless  _idiot_. Arrogant  _prat._  Did the Doctor really intend to lie to him like this? Did the Doctor imagine he could claim he didn’t ache for him, and that he might, after all that had occurred between them, be believed? That the Master would accept such eviscerating denials, that he would tolerate such blatant mendacity? Well, the Doctor was  _wrong,_  about everything.  
  
***  
  
  
The Doctor sat up in bed with his back against the headboard, too occupied with brooding to sleep. He was still wearing his trousers, braces and shirtsleeves, not even having managed to undress for the night, when the wall opened. Not the door—that was on the opposite side of the room, and firmly locked against any possible intruders. The wall paneling itself slid neatly back—so neatly the Doctor could see that it had been designed to do so, and thought himself an idiot for not realizing much earlier that the distance between the palace’s corridors allowed for a narrow passage between the walls. Of course the Master would have built in an escape route only he knew about, and naturally he would have cleverly disguised the paneling and entrance catches by overlaying the palace walls with ornamental carving. All of that was only to be expected of the brilliant, paranoid, obsessively well-prepared Master he knew and—well. Knew.  
  
As the Master stepped through the newly-revealed door, the Doctor scrambled to his feet on the other side of the bed, in the narrow canyon between it and the wall, keeping it between them.   
  
“To what do I owe the—”  
  
“Shut up,” the Master snapped, his expression so vicious, his eyes so black, that the Doctor swallowed apprehensively. Ignoring the Doctor’s attempt to maintain his distance, the Master stalked around to his side of the bed. The Doctor stepped backwards as the Master advanced with gathering speed. The Master slammed the Doctor into the wall he’d been backing towards, the black leather gloved hand on the Doctor’s right shoulder, moving up to grip his neck. The Doctor’s eyes widened at the pressure, at the sudden, wildly unanticipated threat of being choked.   
  
The Master moved in a sudden snap, his mouth on the Doctor’s even as his hand tightened, keeping the Doctor still. The Doctor opened his mouth to him automatically—his body had been trained almost since its birth to respond to the Master like a thing bespoke. He slackened, made a slight noise that was nearly a moan, shoved his hips forward as if in a moment he might wrap his legs around the Master’s waist in a wanton invitation for the to man fuck him through the wall. The Doctor’s eyes slipped half closed, then shut entirely.   
  
The Master had endured for several days now with only the scant comfort their remembered trysts and his own ministrations could provide. The Doctor was too self-conscious to allow himself a similar nostalgic release. By now, he was perhaps even more desperate to be taken than the Master was to take him.   
  
The Master chuckled into their kiss, cynically amused that  _this_  was the worth of all the Doctor’s protestations. The sound jarred the Doctor, and his dreamily closed eyes snapped open. The Doctor began to struggle in the Master’s grip, fingers scraping against the velvet pile of the Master’s shoulders as he attempted to push him off.   
  
“Stop that,” the Doctor hissed when he’d managed to force the Master back. The Master’s eyes narrowed. His grip on the Doctor’s neck felt cold, hard,  _metallic_ , the Doctor blinked with the shock of realization, as the Master drew away with a smug smile on his face. The Doctor’s breath caught as he recognized the weight of the slave collar and cuffs the Master had released him from months ago. Before the Doctor could react, the Master released his neck and caught his wrists. He shoved those elegant hands together and forced them up above the Doctor’s head, then ran the fingers of his right hand down the length of the Doctor’s arm, returning to his neck.  
  
“Just look at yourself, Doctor,” the Master murmured, his face so close to his captive’s he could see every panicked flicker of the Doctor’s eyes as he squirmed in his bonds. “See how readily you move for me.” He stroked his right hand down from the collar decorating the Doctor’s neck. The Doctor watched him silently, trying not to shake.  
  
The Master gently slipped the bottom buttons of the Doctor’s shirt loose, and the Doctor exhaled sharply when the Master’s hand at last brushed the bare skin of his stomach. The Master stopped there, casting an amused glance down at the Doctor’s trousers, where his cock had half-hardened at his attention, in just the anticipation of his touch. If the Doctor himself was wayward, his body was the Master’s faithful congregation, yielding to him with the exquisite, automatic obedience of call and response.   
  
“Try and tell me, if you can,” the Master said, his voice a husky near-whisper, “that you don’t belong to me alone. That you’re not aching to be reminded of it.” He was so sure the Doctor would crumple for him. In his mind he was already making up for misspent days, fucking the Doctor desperately on this miserable, lonely little bed. Making him  _scream_  apologies. Accepting them afterwards—forgiving the Doctor so that everything could return to the way had been—to the relationship he’d thought himself to be in before he’d destroyed everything by speaking its name aloud.  
  
The Doctor looked him in the eye. “Terribly sorry,” he said, brittle and maddeningly casual, “I’m afraid you must’ve mistaken me for someone else. I’m not property, and if I were  _yours,_  I’d try to forget it whenever possible.”  
  
The Master growled, twisting something around his hand. The Doctor jerked forward, startled, then looked down. His collar had been augmented with a long, thin chain that draped down from its center to settle firmly in the Master’s grasp.   
  
“What have you—” the Doctor began. In response, the Master turned around and walked back out into the passageway, forcing the Doctor to follow him or strangle himself. His cheeks burned with the indignity of it. “I’m not your plaything,” he snapped.  
  
“I beg to differ.” The Master jerked hard on the lead, walking on, forcing the Doctor to keep up with him. “If I so choose, that’s  _exactly_  what you are.” He smacked a panel and waited a moment as the walls shifted like the internal configuration of a TARDIS. The Master strode forward, pressed his hand against the wall, and stepped into his room, which would have been on another floor without the benefit of dimensionally transcendent architectural engineering. Once in their—in the  _Master’s_  bedroom, the Doctor wrenched away, diving across the bed on his hands and knees, grabbing the Master’s Tissue Compression Eliminator from the top of his nightstand.   
  
The Master launched himself after the Doctor, flipping him over onto his back and straddling him. “That weapon is useless in your hands,” the Master panted, forcing the arm that held the weapon back so that the TCE was pointed towards the ground. “You’d never have the courage.”  
  
“You don’t know me nearly so well as you’d like to think,” the Doctor said through gritted teeth, struggling under the force of the Master’s grip, which was tight with rage and frustrated desire.   
  
“Don’t I?” He bent down to lick the Doctor’s flushed face, to shove his tongue into his gasping mouth, to grab his cock through the fabric of his strained trousers. The Doctor squeaked in surprise at that unexpected move, bucking up helplessly into the Master’s grip. The hand holding the TCE sagged, slackened. The Doctor’s head tilted back over the edge of the bed and the Master moved down to suck his throat. His world spun dizzily, drunkenly. A sudden bite made the Doctor gasp, shut his eyes and drop the TCE altogether. It rolled away under the dresser, forgotten.   
  
“You never mentioned how much you would enjoy having your hand forced,” the Master murmured, unbuttoning the rest of the Doctor’s shirt and unsnapping his braces.   
  
“I don’t,” the Doctor hissed, squirming to get away and to get out of his clothes in one confused motion.  
  
“You never knew that you did,” the Master corrected, taking his time undoing the Doctor’s button fly and insinuating his hand there, running his fingers along the Doctor and giving him a few hard strokes, until his hips were rising and falling with the motion of the Master’s hand. Satisfied, he slipped free and lifted the Doctor’s hips, stripping him of his trousers. Again he wrapped his gloved fist around the Doctor’s cock, enjoying for a moment how the pale skin flushed scarlet wherever his rapacious hands touched, like visible corruption. Still fully clothed, he bent to take the Doctor in his mouth, intent on tasting him, on reclaiming everything the Doctor had so viciously kept from him.   
  
This was another activity he’d unexpectedly come to enjoy. The Doctor, outwardly so prim, became incredibly reactive at the touch of his mouth, and was so entirely under his power like this. Tauntingly he ran his tongue around just the head of the Doctor’s cock, sucking it, lapping only at the very top of the nerve that ran down the length of his penis. The Doctor fisted his hands in the bed sheets and then, when the Master stayed right where he was, only  _just_ touching him rather than doing it properly, in the Master’s hair.   
  
“Master  _stop,_ ” the Doctor breathed even as his hips bobbed up greedily under the Master’s unyielding grip, desperate to fuck his throat.  
  
 _You don’t want this, then?_  the Master enquired in his mind.  
  
“No,” the Doctor said aloud through his teeth, slamming his mind shut and doing everything he could to keep it locked tight.   
  
Infuriated by the Doctor’s hypocrisy, at being denied, rejected and kept from what was rightly his yet  _again_ , the Master slammed his mouth to the root of the Doctor’s cock and set to work, determined to make him want this uncontrollably and undeniably. He shamelessly used everything he’d ever learned about the Doctor’s preferences, pulling him towards a climax as relentlessly as he’d pulled him down the hall on a chain, flicking his tongue over the Doctor’s frenulum with cruel strength and persistence, relishing how the Doctor’s faster, louder moans were being cut off by his breathy gasps.  
  
“It’s too—” the Doctor tried, shaking, wound tight enough to break, gulping for air, “I can’t—”  
  
The Master wasn’t interested in mercy, and he raked his teeth over the particularly good spot he’d just tongued into hypersensitivity. The Doctor came with a snap and a cry. He felt weak afterwards, devoured. The Master licked his lips and climbed up his body, kissing the Doctor hard, forcing him to taste himself.   
  
He sat up and leaned back against the headboard, slipping out of his trousers. “Come here.” The Master began to undo the buttons of his jacket and tugged the lead in his hand, forcing the Doctor to crawl into his lap on his hands and knees. He used the hand not holding the leash to riffle through the Doctor’s nightstand and remove a bottle of salve, tossing it to the Doctor, who caught it neatly.  
  
“Ready yourself for me,” the Master told him imperiously, raising an eyebrow at the Doctor’s narrowed eyes, stripping off his gloves at last so he could feel the Doctor moving under his hands.   
  
With a glare, the Doctor spun the cap off the bottle, slicking two fingers and wincing briefly as he slid both of them inside himself without prelude.   
  
“So desperate? You’re allowed to go slowly. I haven’t asked you to hurt yourself.” The Master propped his hands behind his head and watched the Doctor glare at that, watched him move on his own long fingers—watched him twitch as he worked himself wider for his Master’s pleasure. He pushed these thoughts up against the Doctor’s infuriatingly shut mind, letting the Doctor hear them, letting them jar and spark up against that resistance. He slicked the fingers of the Doctor’s other hand and curled them around his own erection, guiding the Doctor to stroke him in preparation.  _Lovely,_  the Master thought, running a hand down the Doctor’s spine, enjoying the incredible eroticism of watching him.   
  
But his own cock twitched needily at the wait, and soon the Master pulled the Doctor up and onto him, aligning himself and giving the Doctor no warning before he shoved up, earning a pained grimace paired with a gasp of pleasure from the Doctor, a falter in his tight shields. Then his mouth snapped back from a wide O into a thin line— _determined to bear it, bless him._    
  
“Move,” the Master muttered throatily after a few unnecessarily punishing thrusts. The Doctor began to bounce. “Harder,” the Master’s voice scraped out, and the Doctor’s body rocked with frantic passion, his face bore a delicious expression of disorientation. The Master lifted his hand from the Doctor’s back and smacked his ass hard enough to leave a red handprint on his fair skin.  
  
“ _Master_ ,” the Doctor gasped at the shock of the impact, and the Master nearly moaned when every successive smack made the name pop from his lips once more, repeating it like a prayer. The Master was so aroused he was giddy with it. He licked his lips—had he ever been so hard in his life? The Master stared at him, decadent and perfect, almost in awe.  
  
He broke through the Doctor’s weakened mental barrier, shoving himself in, touching everything he could. His mind was as invasive and determined as if he were physically tying the Doctor down and fucking him stupid, and he relished the natural resistance of the Doctor’s consciousness to such an intimate intrusion even as he welcomed the tight grip of his flesh. He sucked the Doctor’s mind into his own, greedily taking more and more of the Doctor into himself.   
  
“Kiss me,” he ordered, utterly enchanted. The Doctor set his jaw and made no move to do so, tipping back when the Master exerted pressure on his lower back to bring him close, fucking himself on the Master’s cock almost stubbornly. The Master grabbed the lead and forced the Doctor’s head down, forced the Doctor’s closed lips to open for his tongue. He grabbed the Doctor’s right wrist and stroked his thumb along the cuff, turned his head and licked along the left, then brought them together to seal them with his biokey, forcing the Doctor’s hands around his neck to keep him near, trapped in an embrace.   
  
“You’re mine,” the Master said with conviction and triumph. “Tell me you are.”  
  
“Why would you want,” the Doctor managed without ceasing for an instant the harsh coulé of his hips against the Master’s, “me to lie to you?”  
  
“ _Mine_ ,” the Master insisted angrily, ratcheting the Doctor’s arousal up to near-painful levels directly through his mind, guiding the Doctor’s hips with his hands, forcing him to bounce faster, to impale himself on his Master’s cock.  
  
“Mas—Master!” Unbearably close, the Doctor’s arms trembled desperately around the Master’s sensitive neck, their fluttering delightful.  
  
“Say it, Doctor, let me hear you say it,” he nearly begged, needing this to push him over the edge, wrapping his hand around the Doctor’s cock and giving it hard pumps.  
  
“I— ah!  _Please_ , I—” the Doctor whimpered, then dissolved into a series of high, breathy, rippling-sharp noises.   
  
“ _Doctor_ ,” the Master growled.  
  
“Yours, yours, I’m—god, Master, I’m yours,” the Doctor gasped deliriously.  
  
The Master finished inside him with an unusually harsh cry, bursting in his mind like a storm. The Doctor, as if spurred by that impetus, coated his stroking hand with come. He dipped his forehead to rest on the Master’s, breathing raggedly for whole minutes in an attempt to recover.  
  
“There now,” the Master said when they could both breathe again, sounding far too pleased with himself. “Isn’t that better?”   
  
The Doctor stiffened. Under normal circumstances he would have stayed in the Master’s lap for some time, but at that comment he soundlessly brought his hands up over the Master’s head and slid off him and to the side. He lay with his head propped up on his bound arms. The Master reached over to stroke his side and unlock his wrists and collar, and Doctor stayed perfectly still and unresponsive.   
  
“What is it, my dear?” the Master asked, all post-coital bliss and self-satisfaction. The Doctor was his, and everything was right in the universe.   
  
“Can I have a new particle dasher? For the lab.”  
  
The Master frowned. “What an odd request—of course you may, just order it.”   
  
“Would you give me Uxian chocolates?” the Doctor pressed. “French champagne?”  
  
“Certainly, if you’d like—”   
  
“Sapphire jewelry from Metabilis Three?” He pouted at the Master. “And a Trakken seal-fur coat?”  
  
“What is this  _about_ , Doctor?”  
  
“I’m given to understand pleasure slaves, concubines and what have you customarily receive favors—I wouldn’t want to feel left out. Didn’t I please you? Is there anything else I can do for you, Master? Wouldn’t you like to come in my mouth? No? Perhaps you’d like to tie me up and fuck me ‘till I beg and cry—that sounds very diverting, and I do excellent crocodile tears, you know. Or would you prefer to shove your whole fist inside me—I’ve certainly felt you thinking about it every time I bend over in your presence these last weeks. There’s no need to be coy—I’m only your slave, after all.”   
  
The Doctor spoke quickly, gathering force and speed, giving the Master no time to react. "And isn’t there anything else you’d like me to say? After all, I’d do anything for you, anything at all to make sure you got the most possible enjoyment out of me. ‘Oh  _Master_ , you’re so good,’” the Doctor mocked his own thick, lost tones ruthlessly. “‘Please, Master, I’m yours, I belong to you. Oh,’” he moaned, “‘Take me, darling. Fuck me until I  _break._  Oh please marry me, because I love you, Master,  _so very_  much!’” The Doctor’s lipid, adoring expression dropped and shattered like a plate, and his tone snapped instantly back to flat pleasantness. “None of that? No?”  
  
“Get out.” The Master’s face was devoid of expression. He almost didn’t seem to breathe.  
  
“Well, if you’re  _sure_  you don’t want to play that ‘Zeus and Ganymede’ game you like so much,” the Doctor said sarcastically, sliding off the bed and gathering his clothes, dressing quickly.   
  
“Get out  _now_ ,” the Master said again, still dangerously quiet.   
  
“You would insist on starting it,” the Doctor muttered coldly, snapping his braces into place as he walked out into the hall. He left the Master alone to stare at the closed door behind him, feeling as though he’d been sliced to ribbons.  
  
  
***  
  


The Crane Wife   
Chapter 6, Part II  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
The Master spent the next two black days discovering that hating the Doctor didn’t help. This crystallized absolutely in his mind when opening his bedroom door to a soft knock at a quarter past midnight revealed the man himself.  
  
“Could I come in?” the Doctor asked, voice hushed.   
  
He would have quite liked to slam the door in the Doctor’s face, preferably with a hearty laugh at his expense. By all rights he should have done. He should have ignored him, or punched him in the jaw, done anything but, with tight, suspicious eyes, step aside to allow the Doctor in. But he couldn’t help it. The Master’s advocates and detractors alike agreed that the man was as ruthlessly self-promoting as he was clever, but he was nevertheless,  _completely_ against his own best interest, upset by the Doctor’s wretchedly miserable expression. Loathing the Doctor, it seemed, was not quite enough to overcome the effects of adoring him.   
  
“Well?” the Master asked curtly, shutting the door behind him. When he turned around the Doctor—who so rarely initiated physical contact—had lifted a hand to cup the Master’s cheek. He stepped close, and the Master, startled, had to look up at him to meet his gaze, unhappily reminded that the Doctor was a good deal taller than him.   
  
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said, bending down to kiss him chastely, dropping his hand as he pulled back. “I wanted you to know how very sorry I am.”  
  
“For what, precisely?” the Master asked, his eyes narrow. “Your previous display?”  
  
“For everything.” The Doctor flicked his eyes away, uncomfortable. “I couldn’t leave things as they were. I—reacted poorly. No matter what you might’ve done, for my part, I behaved terribly.” He swallowed, turning his face back to the Master’s.   
  
“Thank you. I too,” he cleared his throat in an embarrassed manner, “reacted poorly, as you put it. Now satisfy my curiosity. If we were to go to bed now what might you have to say to me afterwards? I would of course wish to calculate whether anything you might give me could possibly be worth the aftereffects.”  
  
The Doctor winced. “Believe me, I regret saying what I did. There was no cause for me to be quite so—”  
  
Anything the Doctor might say about his own behavior would imply that the Master had been weak enough to be hurt by it, and so the Master cut him off. “How precisely do you intend to repay your debt, Doctor?”  
  
The Doctor grinned at the use of his name, which was nearly an endearment in the Master’s parlance. He took the Master’s hand and led him to the bed, sitting down and encouraging the Master to do the same beside him, kissing him almost in gratitude when he did.   
  
“Sexual favors? How very predictable,” the Master mock-chided.  
  
“Well, if I’m  _boring_  you—” the Doctor raised an inquisitive eyebrow, making to rise.  
  
“I said nothing of the kind,” the Master corrected, pulling him back down. Neither did he say that he had missed the Doctor, or that if he had ever been confused as to which he needed more, the Doctor’s body or his affection and esteem, he was now settled on the point. If the Doctor demanded the Master never so much as touch him again, he’d agree in exchange for the Doctor’s assurance that he’d never leave, never remove the Master so entirely from the sphere of his regard. But the Doctor had come to him, and to apologize, no less, for events the Master had been almost ready (at the considerable sacrifice of his pride) to beg the Doctor’s forgiveness for. He must have missed the Master just as badly. The Master’s grin bordered on giddy stupidity, but he took no notice. “This is rather a consummation devoutly to be wished. As it happens, I have something specific in mind.”  
  
The Doctor paused for a moment, surprised and delighted. “Did you read Shakespeare for me? Just because I mentioned him?”  
  
The Master rolled his eyes. ‘Mentioned’ scarcely described the Doctor’s constant stream of references to the literature he’d grown up with. “I do a great many unusual and questionably reasonable things under your influence.”  
  
The Doctor was still grinning widely. “But did you  _like_  it? What did you read?”  
  
“Yes, several of the plays, and perhaps we might discuss it after I’m done taking my vengeance on you.” The man’s mayfly attention often needed forcibly dragged back to the subject at hand.  
  
“Ah, yes, right, sorry,” the Doctor shook his head to clear it.   
  
“If I may elaborate, we are going—” the Master paused to select the appropriate words, “to play a game. Consider my request a challenge.”  
  
“Go on.” The Doctor’s interest was piqued.  
  
“You’re an intolerable prattler everywhere but his room,” the Master murmured, leaning forward to drop a kiss on the Doctor’s obligingly raised neck. “You do your damndest to hold your tongue in bed. The reasons of course,” he stroked his hands along the Doctor’s arms, “are obvious. You’ve no intention of letting me enjoy your complete loss of self-possession. I’ve tolerated your evasions to a point, but I  _want_  to see that abandon, and you’re going to give me this in payment for your offenses. Start talking—whatever flits into your nubile little mind. I’m sure your conversation will grow ever more interesting as the night progresses.”  
  
“Or?” The Doctor looked both uncomfortable and determined not to loose an inch of ground.   
  
“Simple, my dear Doctor. Or I’ll stop, and you can crawl back to that cot you apparently prefer to my bed.”  
  
“You  _wouldn’t_.”  
  
“Wouldn’t I?” The Master raised an eyebrow, bluffing hard when he was desperate for a reconciliation. “I’ve been quite patient with you these last days—I believe I’ve proven that I’m capable of waiting. Unless of course you feel yourself inadequate to the task? I could make allowances for your weakness, I suppose, if you begged prettily enough.”  
  
“Oh you—I’ve won  _awards_  for my prattling, I’ll have you know! Very well,” the Doctor huffed, “I accept!”  
  
“Excellent,” the Master chuckled. “I was hoping you would. Begin now.”   
  
The Doctor opened his mouth, “Doubt thou the stars are fire—” before he could finish the quatrain (he could spout Shakespeare all night, if necessary, and would do before he  _lost_ ), the Master was kissing him, completely throwing him off his flow, the cheating—and lifting his head, breaking the kiss, stroking the Doctor’s arms again as the Doctor stared up at him, dazed.  
  
“Well?” the Master smirked.  
  
“That’s nice,” the Doctor said automatically of the caresses, causing the Master to chuckle at his having managed to stun the Doctor into banality, which in turn caused the Doctor to blush. He squirmed, trying to guide the Master’s hands over to his shirt buttons.   
  
“Impatient, Doctor?”  
  
“Well, yes, actually,” the Doctor murmured, his blush intensifying. “It’s been two days. Which isn’t a long time in the general scope of things, obviously, but—”  
  
The Master laughed at him. “My poor neglected Doctor, how you must have suffered. Ask.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You’re supposed to be letting me hear you, so  _ask_. Command, beg, if you like, as long as you keep talking.”  
  
“Please,” the Doctor tried, and the Master only raised an eyebrow. “Please, Master, would you unbutton my shirt?” he corrected himself, feeling ridiculous.   
  
“It’s a beginning, I suppose,” the Master admitted as he slipped the buttons free and pushed open the shirt. He leant to catch the Doctor’s nipple in his teeth.  _How does it feel? Go on—no, out loud,_  he chastised when the Doctor tried to respond in the comfortable shared silence of their minds.   
  
“Sharp,” he gasped as the Master bit harder, rolling his other nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “Hard. I always think you’re going to break me. But sometimes I think I almost wouldn’t mind.”  
  
 _Do go on._  The Doctor was picking this up faster and better than the Master could have hoped - he felt rather proud of him. He was inexperienced, happily, and thus the Master’s to guide through a whole collection of first times, but he was by no means ungifted in these matters. _This?_  He dragged his hand along the waistband of the Doctor’s trousers.   
  
“Like you’re savoring it, or enjoying dragging it out, like you’re,” the Doctor hesitated, “ _amusing_ yourself with me.”  
  
 _Do you mind?_  
  
“No,” he muttered, lifting a hand to thread his fingers in the Master’s hair. “No, I don’t think I do. G-good,” he swallowed as the Master cupped his erection through his trousers. “Really—” he cast about randomly for something else to say, seizing on a passing thought, “I love it when you kiss me while you—mmph,” the Master had lunged forward on his suggestion, and when he slipped away he barely caught the Doctor whispering, “Faster.”  
  
“Louder,” the Master countered.   
  
“Go faster.” The Doctor’s cheeks were hot: he didn’t know whether with embarrassment or arousal. “I want you.”  
  
“Do you?” the Master asked as he toyed with the fastening of the Doctor’s trousers, voice husky. “I’m not entirely convinced. What precisely do you want?”  
  
“You,” the Doctor murmured, looking up at him, “I want you inside me.”  
  
“And how does that regrettable lack of fulfillment,” the Master paused to steal a kiss, fingers deftly slipping the fastenings loose, “feel?”  
  
“Like—like being a child waiting for holidays—absolute  _torture_ ,” the Doctor started and stuttered as cold air and cool fingers brushed against his cock. “As if my whole body’s tense with anticipation. It obsesses me, it’s-- _you’re_  all I can think about, all I want. You’re the entirety of the universe, then. You’re all that exists for me. Master.”   
  
“As it should be,” the Master muttered, but his mouth was dry. He hadn’t expected this strategy; that he should be brought to his knees by sweetness rather than filth was entirely unanticipated, entirely  _like_  the Doctor. “It’s a wonder I ever condescend to fuck you, when you’re so blessedly focused beforehand.” He hurried the Doctor out of his trousers.  
  
The Doctor squirmed in his hold, hastening the disrobing process along. “But you love it,” he countered. “That’s the best part—well, one of the best parts. The intent look on your face, the almost desperate  _snap_  of your hips. The way your mind shudders and settles. Few things as provocative as being desired, but I find being so enjoyed to be even better. The way you look at me, it’s,” he smiled weakly, “over-mastering.”  
  
“Go on,” the Master coaxed, digging in the drawer for lubricant. He was slightly self-conscious about any reference to his infatuation, but taken with how arousing the Doctor found his attention. “Turn around. On your hands and knees.”  
  
The Doctor complied, and in a moment continued without having to be coaxed into it. “It’s always a trial, waiting when I feel so ready, so impatient for you to just—” He gasped as the Master slid a slick finger around the rim of his anus, pressing lightly, flicking his fingertips back around in a neat, exquisite, torturous circumnavigation. “ _God_ , Master, just—” he lost the thought in another gasp as the Master’s finger slipped inside him.   
  
“At first it—hurts-” Two more fingers slid in suddenly, pressing, stretching, something possessive in the sure way they played him. “That can’t be denied. But I almost—no I  _do_ enjoy the pain.” The Master tapped his thigh and the Doctor automatically spread his legs farther apart for him, biting his lip as when the Master forced the broad head of his cock past the tight ring of muscle, breathing quickly as a series of quick, short thrusts brought the Master fully in. Sweet and eager, rewarding his regular thrusts by yielding himself up to him, clinging to him, all succulent pressure, delicious twitches. The Master smiled ruefully: the Doctor’s body, at least, knew how it felt.   
  
The Doctor dropped his head, mouth open, panting. “Then it feels strange,” his breath strained, his words coming after hard spaces, at sharp angles. “Foreign, invasive and unqualifiable. But a curious sort of tension builds, and it begins to be—perfect. You’re so— You find your rhythm, and the world gets terribly narrow. You seem to know exactly when I need more, I don’t know whether it’s telepathy or serendipity. You’re all I can see, this is all I care about—you could fuck me forever. I wish you would.”   
  
And that terrified him almost more than slavery confined him. The latter could only ever be temporary, could only touch his body, and he’d known misadventure and peril too intimately to be more than quite indignant at his current predicament. But he’d never known an affection that passed into crippling need. He had no idea how to handle anything closer to the hearts than extreme fondness. He couldn’t even think of that fear now – he was too occupied to think of anything but what he was doing. His hips desperately rose to meet the other man’s, his eyes were wide and lost, his mind would focus on nothing but its entwinement with the Master’s.   
  
The Master swallowed, wanting to kiss the Doctor to reward him for the praise, but wanting still more to hear him continue with his left-handed declaration. He’d  _known_  the Doctor had been lying when he claimed not to care for him, of course he’d known, but now the Doctor’s every word quelled another of the vicious doubts his decidedly cool reception of the Master’s proposal had aroused.   
  
“That’s—ah—lovely,” the Doctor panted, starring ahead of him at the wall with glazed eyes, the hands he used to support himself shaking, “really— _oh_ —Master.” He folded, dropping down to his elbows, arse high, his back a long, lovely slide of pale skin. The Master ran a hand down it, infinitely satisfied, then dug his fingers into the Doctor’s hips, holding him still as he delivered a series of harder, deeper thrusts.   
  
“Again,” the Master murmured, dazzled by the sheen of the Doctor’s back, the way he rocked into the Master’s thrusts, seemed desperate to impale himself on the Master’s cock, the filthy way he moaned. “Say it again.”  
  
“ _Master_ ,” Increasingly heated, the Doctor slammed his hips back, vigorous and obliging, as though the Master’s cock were a toy he were fucking himself with.   
  
“Two days and you’re  _gagging_  for it. Even if I’d never bought you, you’d still belong to me,” the Master hissed appreciatively, his grin broadening wickedly when the Doctor gasped with a sudden, unexpected rush of arousal at the accusation. “You’re  _mine_ ,” he pressed, and the Doctor made a noise that was almost a mewl. “Aren’t you? You  _need_  this, don’t you? Tell me you need me.” After a moment’s unsatisfactory silence the Master drew almost entirely out and gave him a punishing thrust.  
  
“Ah! Yes,” the Doctor admitted. “Yes,” he repeated a touch sulkily. “Keep going. Please.”  
  
“Earn it, Doctor.”  
  
In accordance with their game, the Doctor did. He kept talking, albeit less eloquently than before. He let the noises he usually smothered burst out—short with shock, high with pleasure, inarticulate except for the luxuriant way the Master’s name lolled thick in his mouth, the way it emerged at turns long, breathy, pouty, reverent. The Master came shaking, his eyes rolling back. When he could breathe properly again he pulled the Doctor off his knees and back into his lap, the Master still inside him. He let the Doctor’s head roll back against his shoulder as he stroked his cock, pushing him into an orgasm that left him weak and trembling in the Master’s arms. The Doctor breathed heavily, trying to recover himself, and the Master tenderly bit the junction of his neck and shoulder before lowering him to the bed and climbing down after him.   
  
“Thank you,” the Doctor, said quietly after a moment, facing away. “You’ve been—you’ve been so good to me, in this respect. I’ve appreciated that. I don’t want you to think I haven’t.”  
  
The Master, in a post-coital daze, was puzzled by his tone, but not insensible of the compliment. He lazily stroked the Doctor’s side with what energy he could muster. “You’re quite welcome. Always.”  
  
The Doctor turned to face him. He studied the Master as if he were memorizing his face. The Master gave him an inquiring look, and he shook his head as if to say it was nothing. “Once upon a time,” he began with faux-solemnity and the Master recognized the opening from a conversation of theirs the previous week—he’d been amazed that Earth fairy tales could exist in such an imprecise chronology.  
  
“A bedtime story?” the Master chuckled.   
  
The Doctor smiled, half playful, half wistful. “If you like.”   
  
The Master sighed at the Doctor’s eccentricity with fond tolerance. “Proceed then, if you must.”  
  
“Nearly every tribe on earth had this story, or some version of it. A farmer catches sight of woman—if she’s a woman, and not a tennin, or a valkyrie, a sky spirit of some sort—bathing in a lake. He’s captivated by her, for some reason or another. He wants, desperately, to possess her. So desperately that what happens next is almost excusable, in a way, because he can’t help himself.”  
  
 _“Some reason or other?”_  the Master teased. “Presumably she’s unearthly, exquisite beyond anything the poor rustic has ever known.”  
  
“Perhaps,” the Doctor said uncomfortably.   
  
“What happens next?” the Master raised an eyebrow, stroking his arm.   
  
The Doctor flinched under the touch, but so slightly the Master himself couldn’t feel it. “The farmer sees a garment hanging from the tree branch—she’s put it there for safe-keeping whilst she bathes. It’s a magical garment, which allows her to transform into a creature more ethereal than the flesh she’s washing. Perhaps it’s a fox skin, and she’s a kitsune with seven red tails, but more often—almost always, in fact—it’s a cloak of feathers. She’s a creature of flight.   
  
“This garment is organic—it’s a part of her body, her birthright, her nature. This is his only opportunity, and he takes it. The woman emerges, and she stands perplexed, wet and shivering, hideously vulnerable in her human skin. ‘Where is my cloak,’ she asks him. ‘What have you done with what’s mine?’  
  
“He doesn’t tell her. She’s grounded there. She can’t fly away, can’t return home. Imagine his rough hands on her new skin, which has hardly seen the light, and has never known touch. He doesn’t want to give her up, and he doesn’t realize the cruelty of what he’s doing. He’s like a child. They’re both innocent, in a way.   
  
“In most of the stories they marry, and she bears his children. One of them has her father’s boldness, and his love. This child says, ‘Mother, why do you cry each night when father is asleep?’ And though she hasn’t spoken of it for years, the mother tells her daughter that she is weeping for her cloak, her skin. For the world she’s lost. The child finds the cloak and brings it to her, because she can’t stand to see her mother cry. And though the woman cries bitterly at leaving her sons and daughters, and even their father, she immediately takes the cloak and disappears forever, returning to wherever she came from. She cares for them, but that’s simply what she is.”   
  
All the time the Doctor spun out his story, the Master remained quiet, unmoving. “How selfish of her,” he murmured in the silence at the end.   
  
“Master,” the Doctor sighed, “how could any vow I might give you mean anything to you, if it wasn’t given freely?”  
  
“If I gave you your liberty you might never return. That is a risk I  _will_  not take,” the Master admitted, softly. “Don’t ask it of me.” He would give the Doctor anything else, if the Doctor would let him. If he would have it.  
  
The Doctor sighed, as though he were giving up on something or someone. “Then I won’t.”   
  
The Master blinked, disbelieving. A smile emerged tentatively, then stretched across his face. “You can’t mean it. Surely you haven’t come to your senses?”  
  
“Oh, I mean every word I say,” the Doctor insisted, though, cleverer than Alice, he knew that to say what he meant was a different matter entirely. He smiled too, but there was something tight in it. “If that’s how you feel, well, consider the question closed. I’ll never bring it up again.”  
  
Stunned, bewildered, hardly daring to believe his luck, the Master simply looked at him until the Doctor leaned forward to kiss him soundly.   
  
“Rest,” the Doctor suggested, and though the night was too hot for it they slept entangled.   
  
***  
  
In the morning the Doctor was gone, but where he’d lain was still warm, and so the Master supposed he’d only just scrambled off to work. He smiled indulgently at the Doctor’s preoccupation with his latest intellectual endeavor—surely he might have guessed that the Master would have encouraged him to stay in today.   
  
A quick command to the building’s main computer brought up an image of the lab. There, the Doctor was rattling around a harried Professor Linme, dashing in circles about him as he collected supplies, talking the poor man’s ear off. The Master chuckled when the Doctor, whirling to gesture, almost tripped over himself, then recovered with a smile. Shaking his head, he broke the connection and began to dress. He headed into his offices whistling through a grin, to the infinite relief of his staff, who’d borne the brunt of his considerable irritation over the last days.   
  
He worked briskly through the morning, and was just considering calling the Doctor in for lunch when three distinct security claxons went off simultaneously. He frowned, pushing his chair back from the desk, and strode quickly out of his personal office and into the command center.  
  
“Shut off that intolerable noise. What’s going on?”  
  
A clerk raised her small, worried face from the monitors. “We don’t know sir. It appears to be a wall-breach, registering in three sections at once, but I don’t see how it  _can_  be—”  
  
“Logistics do not concern me at the present moment, Miss Abend. From where precisely do the signals arise?”  
  
“All at the far eastern end of the Palace, sir. Hydroponics, a waste chute on the lower level, and,” she avoided his eyes, “the central laboratory, your Excellency.”  
  
The Master’s eyes widened for only a moment, and he said nothing.  
  
“They have excellent security compartments,” the clerk volunteered hesitantly.  
  
“Thank you, Miss Abend, that will be all,” the Master said curtly, cutting his subordinate’s expression of sympathy short. In the event of a crisis the Doctor could be counted on to wander straight into trouble. Granted he was usually quite capable of extricating himself from it, but still—  
  
“My lord,” a major or the guard arrived, short of breath, “communications sent me. They say they’ve lost control of the system, sir.”  
  
“What—” the Master began, but a canned, metallic voice blared from the speaker grill in the ceiling, drowning him out.   
  
“SURRENDER!” the voice demanded. “SURRENDER TO THE DALEKS!”   
  
The Master paled. He was suddenly far more concerned for his own safety, that of his palace, and the Doctor, who might already have fallen victim to what appeared to be an invasion.   
  
***  
  
  
The guns the Master issued his security squadrons were of his own design, and capable, via a randomized electric pulse, of frying a Dalek’s central nervous system, entirely immobilizing it on the spot. Once he’d flicked back the safety, the caged electricity made it vibrate in the Master’s grip, numbing his hand even through his gloves. He’d chosen prudence over bravery in light of the severity of the threat, and walked escorted by a full battalion, in the middle of the group in case the Daleks suddenly rounded any corners.   
  
The Master had assumed the Daleks would still be licking their wounds after their last Movellan debacle, which he estimated had eliminated a third of their fleet. That meddlesome species’ preoccupation with the Movellan wars was one of the factors that had led him to found his empire in this relatively calm temporal period. He was surprised that they’d bothered to attack in numbers small enough to have slipped through his space-lanes and planetary security nets without detection.   
  
He could only remember having named the species once in the Doctor’s presence. The Doctor had registered no special recognition, had made no comment. It was possible, given the vastness of the universe, that his wanderings had never brought him in contact with them. The Doctor might not realize the severity of the threat they represented, might get himself killed attempting to talk his way around them. He might not know that the Daleks were well aware of how to kill a Time Lord permanently. Losing the Doctor’s current regeneration, of which the Master was very fond, would be undoubtedly painful, but losing the Doctor altogether hardly bore thinking about.  
  
“Sir—bodies,” a private called back to him from the front. “It’s the East-wing’s security division, sir. Looks like they were intercepted trying to reach this section’s cache point to pick up their anti-Daleks. Not a mark on ‘em, but they’re all—” the private broke off. “They’re still warm, sir.”  
  
“Then we’re close,” the Master said shortly, considering the corridors the intruders might’ve gone down from here, the vulnerable points in this section. To attack this particular section of the palace, and in such small numbers…Perhaps this wasn’t an invasion, but rather a reconnaissance mission to steal his superior technology, to copy his research databases. In which case, they would have headed straight for the Doctor. “They’re slow-moving,” the Master said, craning his neck to peer down an adjacent corridor. “They can’t have gone far. Proceed towards the main laboratory.”  
  
Static cackled over the speaker systems, and screeching chatter erupted at irregular bursts—the Daleks transmission signals were leaking into the system they’d hacked, causing interference with the delicate communications equipment. Snatches of threats and instructions taunted him with their near-intelligibility, frustratingly present but signifying nothing.   
  
Troops rushed into the laboratory ahead of him, swept the area and shouted back the all-clear. The Master crossed the threshold and looked for himself. Everything appeared well-ordered. There was no sign of anything unusual, let alone a hostile force.   
  
The hairs on the back of his neck were raised, the Master could almost taste that something was wrong. Perhaps he’d misjudged what the Daleks had been after, or—perhaps he’d only thought what he’d been deliberately led to believe.  
  
A nasty, sharp little thought sparked like a flint in the back of his brain.  _No._  
  
The major of the security division over-rode the door release protecting the scientists. Professor Linme came sputtering out first, blinking, lighting on the Master and rushing over to him.   
  
“We heard the sirens and sealed the shelter before they could reach here. I  _tried_  to stop the Doctor from going, but you know what he’s—”  
  
The Master whirled, striding out of the room, away from them all, walking quickly back to the heap of bodies on the floor. Some of his security staff trailed after him, clueless as to what he was doing, but loyal. He hardly noticed them. Reaching the bodies, the Master knelt down, pressed his fingers to the man’s neck, and waited. There, so sluggish and soft as to be nearly undetectable, was a living man’s pulse.  
  
  
The Master breathed deeply, scenting the air. Now that he was searching for it, he could detect a slight acridity, which he might’ve attributed to Dalek energy weapons if it weren’t noticeably stronger just here, drifting down from the ceiling vent directly above him. The corridor was near enough to this floor’s cache to make it seem as if the guards might’ve been headed there in response to an emergency, but every day the East-wing division came through it—perhaps an hour ago—whilst making its rounds. The corridor was so infrequently used by the household that no one would accidentally stumble upon a heap of bodies and alert any other security personnel ahead of schedule.   
  
No system was so cleverly devised that it couldn’t be hacked into by a clever enough man. Such a man could avoid being seen entirely, if he traveled through secret passages that had been revealed to him in a thoughtless moment of passion and fury. Sound could be pre-recorded, sampled from news reports, from the humming background noise of signals crossing the universe. Fast-acting, temporary nerve toxin could be found or crafted. Plans could be made by the determined, by the achingly bright. Feathered cloaks, balled up in cabinets, secreted away in old dresser doors, could slip out, pooling at your feet. Your eyes would widen, but you wouldn’t see anything but those feathers, anything but flight.   
  
The Master rose to his feet with graceless haste, and, with a snarl, began to run back towards his rooms, trailed at a little distance by his bemused guard. He ripped open the door, crashing into the room, running through it. A black lacquer box lay splayed open on their bed, its contents scattered messily as though they had been dumped out. In it, he had kept all his keys, sealed by a mathematical logarithm puzzle even a genius couldn’t parse and break without having the puzzle’s rules explained to him beforehand. And even  _then_  it would have taken time—all the time it would have taken the Master to come tearing across the length of the palace to the Doctor’s defense would only  _just_  suffice, if the puzzle were new to him. The Master would have to care for him enough to unthinkingly pelt across the palace at the hint of a threat to his safety, but then that was as predictable as the guards’ daily rotation.  
  
The Master noted this in an instant, and then he was throwing open the always-locked doors of the wardrobe that was his TARDIS, only just in time to hear the last, fading echoes of a dematerialization.   
  
He sank to his knees, white and open mouthed. A guard scuttled in after him, breathless. “Sir—what—”  
  
“Leave,” the Master whispered. Frightened by his unflappable Emperor’s tone, the first guard to reach him did so, shutting the bedroom doors behind him and warning off the other pursuers.   
  
The Master pressed at his memories of last night— _I mean everything I say,_  an almost hypnotic suggestion to rest. Surely he’d have wanted to ask the Doctor why he’d suddenly decided to be reasonable? He hadn’t even questioned it. Spilling out with the recollection came the barely-noticeable pain of well-stitched sutures. While he’d been inside the Doctor, the Doctor had been inside him. While he’d been thinking of nothing but the moment and their reconciliation, the Doctor had been delicately picking at his brain with all the skill the Master had taught him ( _you’re all I can think about_ ), clearing his tracks as he moved—the location of his TARDIS, how to operate the puzzle box, a tweak to the Master’s suggestibility, and  _rest_ , my dear. When he’d said ‘I wish you could fuck me forever,’ he’d meant ‘this is the last time you’ll ever touch me’. ‘I’ll never ask to leave you again’ had been goodbye.   
  
The Master would make sure that vicious little bastard rued the day he’d run from him if it was the last thing he ever did.  
  
***  
  
The Doctor leaned back against his console, hands jammed in his pockets, head down. He stared at the tip of his right plimsole, mind blank. “Home, sweet home,” he said in a listless tone. “Good to see you again, old girl,” he murmured with a touch with more feeling, giving her console casing a fond pat. With a long, outward sigh he straightened up, took off his lab coat and threw it carelessly in the direction of the coat rack. Trailing his fingertips along the console and the walls, he headed deeper into his TARDIS.

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Master hunts the Doctor across the stars (like the faithless git he is), and in the process takes tea with his mother.

A NOTE REGARDING CHAPTERING: I know I've bumped up to eight chapters from five and then from seven, and I am heartily sorry for being a tease re: that. The ending IS all written, and you can expect Chapter Seven Part II within the next day or so, whereupon I'll post this chapter to comms and take this post off f-lock. Chapter 8 is also finished, barring a few pages of epilogue. I expect to finish it and have it off to beta today, and probably to have it posted within a week. The problem with posting everything at once was that is was just too BIG, both for individual posts (all told chapters 7 and 8 would have taken three or four, given the lj character limits) and for the poor beleaguered beta to get through all in one quick go.   
  
So with some minor waiting, here's fic:  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The Crane Wife   
Chapter 7, Part I  
  
  
  
The Master fixed a winning grin on his face and gave the knocker three taps. He waited a few moments, then heard the rustling sound of someone approaching from behind the door. It opened to reveal a middle-aged woman wearing a slightly dirty apron. Her heart-shaped face was almost lost under a loose cloud of red hair.   
  
“Hello,” the Master began, “I am—”  
  
“The  _Master_ , yes,” the woman interrupted him, with only the barest flicker of amusement.   
  
The Master coughed and tried to start again. “And you will—”  
  
“Be delighted to have you as a dinner guest! He said you’d be along—do come in. I can’t leave the meringue for more than a moment, I’m afraid.”  
  
The Master wore a suit and carried a brief case—props that were part of a larger plot. He’d come to Stockbridge to convince the Doctor’s parents he was a government official, here to ask them a few questions about their tax returns. After ‘Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Smith’ admitted him, he would hypnotize them into telling him everything they knew about their son’s recent activities and whereabouts.   
  
He was slightly put out at having been so thoroughly anticipated.  
  
“Just through here,” the Doctor’s mother called over her shoulder.   
  
Grudgingly, the Master followed her into the sunny kitchen where, by all evidence, she appeared to be preparing a Sunday roast ample enough to feed three people, complete with some sort of desert waiting to be smothered in the aforementioned meringue.  
  
“Oh—how rude of me. Verity Smith.” She thrust out a hand to him with a bright grin that was painfully reminiscent of her son’s. The Master shook it, feeling awkwardly exposed without the protection of his gloves—but they would hardly have fit the pose of a civil servant. Even this fine a suit was pushing the bounds of credulity, but it would have annoyed him wear anything shabbier, and he had the most bizarre urge to impress these people.  
  
“Charmed,” the Master said dryly. “I would introduce myself, but it seems my reputation has preceded me.”  
  
“Actually I think he was expecting you a good deal sooner—John came through about a week ago and said you might turn up any day now.” Verity turned back to her oven, stirring something on the hob and occasionally darting a glance back at him. “But I  _thought_  you’d try for a Sunday. There’s a greater chance of both Sydney and I being in, after all, and John implied you were bright enough to think about that sort of thing. And important enough not to want to waste more time than necessary making calls.”  
  
“ _John?_ ” the Master repeated as if he could hardly credit it.   
  
“Oh,  _the Doctor_ , I suppose.” Verity waved an oven-mitted hand airily. “I can’t say it with a straight face, I’m afraid. It’s impossible to call a child you nursed anything so portentously Gallifreyan. If he’d gone with ‘the Biter’ or ‘the Irritatingly Precocious’ I might  _just_  have managed it. Tea?”  
  
“Pardon?”  
  
“Would you like some tea,” Verity repeated patiently. “And if you would, how do you take it?”  
  
“Tea with milk and two sugars would be excellent, thank you.” The Master, ever able to adapt himself to a changing situation, turned the charm up to eleven. He smiled ingratiatingly. “Everything smells delicious.”   
  
Verity gave him a cheeky look. “Of course it does.  _I’m_  making it.” Clearly the Doctor came by his over-weaning self-confidence honestly. “You know, you take your tea exactly like my son does in this regeneration.”  
  
The Master managed to maintain a pleasant expression. “He introduced me to the beverage, actually.”  
  
“How interesting.He said you bought him at a slave market and kept him prisoner for the last year or so,” she said conversationally, putting the kettle on. “And in that period of servitude, I suppose he found time to introduce you to tea?”  
  
The Master bristled. “ _That_  is… a rather circumscribed interpretation of the events.”   
  
“Oh, I know there’s more to it,” Verity fetched down three cups. They were Draconian china work—not so obviously alien as to be suspicious, but easy to identify if you knew what you were looking at. “John rarely lies to me, but he does tend to edit. If the truth would sound too dangerous, or even too unflattering, he tells me whatever version of the story he thinks will make me the happiest. Which is all he wants, really—to do what he likes and for me not to fuss about him. It’s both sweet and infuriating, I find. By the by, he said to give you this.” From a drawer beneath the cabinet that held the delicately patterned cups, Verity pulled a small, sealed envelope. She held it out to him with a casual air.  
  
“How curious.” The Master examined it without opening it. The envelope was—barely—wrinkled. The wax seal was discretely smudged at one corner. “It seems almost as though someone’s already steamed this letter open and then neatly resealed it by ever so slightly reheating the wax.”  
  
“Really? My goodness, it all sounds terribly clever,” Verity said, fetching the sugar bowl.   
  
“What a pity it’s in Gallifreyan, and thus so very difficult to read—such effort shouldn’t go unrewarded.”  
  
“A shame,” Verity agreed.  
  
“I don’t suppose  _you’ve_  learned the language, in your centuries living with your husband and son?”  
  
“Me? Oh, it’s much too difficult for a human, isn’t it? All those tenses and squiggly circles—like a gyroscopic nightmare. Can’t read a word.”   
  
The Master chuckled, then, drawing a knife from his coat pocket, slit the seal. The message was short, and his eyes narrowed as he read it. It was phrased curtly, in a distant tense, without any of the sympathy of line and case that should have marked a letter between lovers. In a language nuanced enough to describe every shade of affection and intimacy, the Doctor had apparently preferred to write to him as though they’d never met.   
  
It hardly contained the apologies or declarations he felt appropriate, given the circumstances of the Doctor’s departure. All it said was that if the Master hurt them (the Gallifreyan noun-symbol he used was loose enough that ‘them’ could be read to encompass his parents, people and planet), the Doctor would never forgive him.   
  
The Master sneered. What made the Doctor think he  _wanted_  his good opinion? He was tempted to conquer the wretched planet just as a gesture, to show the Doctor his place. He crushed the letter viciously in his hand.   
  
The night after the Doctor fled, in the course of his preparations for bed, the Master had opened the bedside table where he kept, among other things, the Doctor’s collar and cuffs. Those had been missing, and in their place had been left a sum amounting to seventy-five drachbars and a short note from the Doctor saying that he considered their debt settled and suggesting the Master buy himself a replacement and/or a small wagon.   
  
This communiqué was almost equally enraging. The Master was tempted to do something rash, but accustomed enough to playing long games to check the impulse. The very suggestion of the Doctor’s good opinion being something the Master stood to  _lose_  was almost hopeful. If he wanted to make the option of returning to him possible and palatable for the Doctor (when the fool realized his mistake, missed his comfortable life, or had exhausted his will to constantly run from the long arm of the Master’s law), then he couldn’t create any insurmountable obstacles to their union. The Master had a feeling that kidnapping the Doctor’s parents and holding them hostage until the Doctor agreed to consult with a wedding planner would be just such a snag.   
  
He sighed and shelved the eighteen excellent plans he’d come up with to subjugate the Earth for fun, profit, and to get the Doctor to come running to defend it. They could, of course, still come into play if he grew  _truly_  desperate, and had exhausted all the options that wouldn’t cause the Doctor the mental anguish he so  _richly_  deserved.  
  
Verity coughed politely, interrupting the Master’s train of thought and handing him his tea.   
  
“Do I smell Earl Grey?” An older man emerged from the den, blinking owlishly. His voice was deep and soft, but brusque. It was the aural equivalent of rubbing a fur coat against the grain.  
  
“Yes, dear.” Verity handed him the third mug.   
  
He took a deep swig, smacking his lips, and gave his wife a mad sort of grin. His white, curly hair stuck out madly from his head. If his wife’s tresses were cloudlike, his reminded the Master of nothing so much as a sea urchin.   
  
“My damn neutrino sorter’s on the blink again—the whole morning’s work’s been spoilt. I’ll make Thete have a look at it when he comes by next. He has such a knack for making rickety old machinery click over when it should have passed on to robot heaven. I say,” he abruptly took notice of the Master, who was standing across the kitchen counter from the lady of the house, holding a mug of tea like it was a foreign object and watching the couple’s conversation with an air of bemusement, “who’s this young man?”   
  
“This is the Master. He’s a friend of our son’s,” Verity said, being politic.   
  
The Doctor’s father squinted at their visitor myopically, fishing a pair of spectacles out of his pocket and donning them. “Not that Time Lord Emperor fellow he was mooning over last week?”  
  
Verity rolled her eyes. “Yes, dear, that one.”  
  
“About damned time, if you ask me,” the Time Lord living as ‘Sydney’ grunted. “Mind you, he never does. Boy, what house are you from?”  
  
Bewildered and bristling at being addressed as a boy, the Master managed to choke out his branch-designation.  
  
“An Oakden,” Sydney turned to his wife. “Well, that’s all right then. I knew his mother—my first cousin, actually. Best of the lot, she was. She didn’t have a son when I left, though.”  
  
“I was born the same year as the Doctor,” the Master put in, feeling he should be making some contribution to the discussion. He would have been more able to if he'd been better prepared. He’d never gotten around to properly examining the files he’d sought out on the Doctor’s father. He hadn’t even guessed that he and the Doctor were so closely related.   
  
Gallifreyan technology could easily weed out genetic impurities. High-ranking Houses and had a vested interest in keeping their property in the family, and they considered their ‘property’ to include their genetic capital, with all its attendant advantages—the products of investment, research, and the trial and error of generations of tinkering. Such close kinship as his and the Doctor’s was actually considered an attractive incentive to marriage.   
  
The Master’s own mother was greatly renowned for her work as both a Matrix coder and a loom specialist. As her only child, his genetic blueprint had been her pet project—the result of years of on-paper development and academic publication before she so much as nudged a nucleotide. Now that he was a renegade some rivals and critics said she’d sacrificed too much stability in pursuit of unorthodox thinking patterns, raw intelligence and drive. Others, however, commended her as they might a sculptor of a truly daring avant-garde piece.  
  
“And you’ve earned a title—did your mother ever get hers? Good girl,  _excellent_  scientist. She should have, you know, if she didn’t.” Belatedly the Master remembered the Doctor’s father had been a well-placed scientist before dropping out of society, and was titled as well. It would be appropriate to address him by either his chosen name or his given name, as he was a not-too-distant family member. The Master debated which would better serve his ends as he answered.  
  
“She’s the Alchemist now, yes, and a Cardinal, my Lord.”   
  
Titles could be awarded by professional or governmental councils, or automatically conferred upon anyone who achieved certain remarkable feats. The Doctor’s father and the Master’s mother had taken the first route. The Doctor, necessarily out of touch with any such councils, had opted for the latter. Technically the Master had done both, but he preferred to think of his name as something he’d taken rather than something he’d been given.  
  
“Good on Avdroshketyananka,” Sydney said warmly. “Now come make yourself useful, boy, and have a look at this neutrino sorter. Come along, tut tut!”  
  
  
***  
  
The Master smoldered with indignation. Sydney had commended him heartily on fixing the neutrino sorter, but he’d been appallingly patronizing about it. The Master hadn’t been treated like a child since long before he’d left the academy, and it had thrown him off to such an extent that he’d failed to make a graceful, immediate escape. He’d suffered through an excellent roast, and was now stuck in the parlor making small talk, taking tea and cake with the Doctor’s human mother. To rub salt in his wounded dignity, from every horizontal surface he was confronted with photographs of the Doctor at various ages, in several incarnations and costumes. If that weren’t painful enough, in at least half the photos the Doctor was being clung to. The guilty parties were universally attractive youths, the like of which had  _better_  not, somewhere in the galaxy, be clinging to the Doctor even now.   
  
“He certainly does have a predilection for bright young things,” the Master noted bitterly, having only succeeded in suppressing the remark for about two minutes of conversation about the various attractions of the surrounding midlands.   
  
The Doctor’s mother raised an eyebrow before realizing what he was talking about and smiling. “Oh not really—not it that sense, at least. More of a penchant for waifs and strays. Besides, several of those girls are his sisters.”  
  
“Sisters? He never said he had any  _sisters._ ” Surely even the Doctor wouldn’t have dissembled about something so immaterial.   
  
“Ah. Well. That’s a bit of a story, actually…”  
  
“One I would be delighted to hear,” the Master assured her, with a friendly, open smile. He intended, if necessary, to use every appropriate charm he possessed (short of hypnotism) to coax her into telling him more. The more she talked, the greater the chance that she would slip and give away some stray detail that would betray the Doctor’s current activities and location.   
  
Nor did the Master have any objection to hearing fresh information on one of his favorite subjects from such a uniquely knowledgeable source. Even admitting to himself the degree of his interest made him feel a lovelorn fool, but he knew perfectly well that if Verity wanted to show off all John ’s glowing youthful report cards, he would politely admire the things.  
  
Verity smiled—a trifle too knowingly for the Master’s liking. “Well, you see, John was born during the War. Sydney, bless him, accidentally landed his TARDIS in entirely the wrong period. I was the nurse matron in charge of a children’s wing during the Blitz of London.”  
  
She nudged the biscuit plate in the Master’s direction, and he obediently took a shortbread square.   
  
“And shall I ask the inevitable question?”   
  
“Ah—how did we meet.” Verity smiled. “One night there was this terrible crash—I thought it was a bomb that hadn’t fully detonated. In that war the Germans started dropping Brandbomben from the air. As I understand it the explosives were supposed to open at altitude and scatter, but occasionally the priming mechanism was faulty; they wouldn’t split, and thus couldn’t be ignited by the charge they carried. The duds still had to be destroyed of course— _monstrous_  things. And so I went to investigate. I walked all the way to the end of the hall and saw… nothing. And whoever heard of a bomb without an entry path?”  
  
“Quite,” the Master agreed, reaching for another square of shortbread, and feeling entirely at home with a technical discussion of incendiary weaponry.  
  
“Then this strange man stumbled out of the supply closet, wearing these ridiculous—well, I know now they were Prydonian robes, but at the time I thought he might be, er,  _touched,_  and going around in a set of curtains. He started to explain, and then I had to tell the very suspicious soldiers ,who came to clear away the bomb, that he was a clown there for the children so they wouldn’t haul him off for questioning. Luckily he could juggle quite convincingly.”   
  
The Master managed to school his features into a polite, enquiring expression, and made a civil noise that prompted Verity to continue.   
  
“Anyway, John was born during the last of those air raids, about nine months later. Maybe it was mad for a girl in her twenties to have a whirlwind courtship with a loveably rubbish, runaway time-traveling alien she’d just met in a broom cupboard. Maybe it was crazy to marry him when I found out I was carrying his child. But those were strange times. Half the city was in ruins—celebrating life seemed the right idea, even if in this case I was half afraid the ‘life’ in question might come with baby-tentacles that dropped off at three months, or some other nonsense my husband had entirely forgotten to warn me about.”  
  
“We do tend to be discreet on the subject of birthing tentacles—some species, I am given to understand, find them off-putting,” the Master deadpanned.  
  
Verity snorted. “I say half-afraid—I wouldn’t have been greatly surprised, after ‘two hearts, no really’ and ‘sometimes I go out wearing a different body.’ Now, as for the girls—when the War ended in ‘45 there were, well, a great many orphans. I asked my husband if we could take some in—clearly the money wasn’t a problem. He said a pack of developing humans running around the place might interfere with his work. I told him he was being so fastidious and non-interventionist he could run for the High Council—that shut him up.   
  
He said one might be all right, and so I argued him up to two, and actually told the orphanage they could send over as many as four. And then five, all girls, showed up at the door, and he was having none of it. Fine, I said, tell them yourself. He stomped into the living room to do it, and five minutes later he came back out having failed to so much as glare at the poor things, and said we could make the second floor dimensionally transcendental without attracting  _too_ much notice from the neighbors.   
  
“And so John had five little sisters, as you see.” Verity gestured to a picture in which an enthusiastic blond boy was trying to coerce a circle of dubious-looking girls into playing cricket with him. A nearby photo showed the same group in boaters and school uniforms, punting, with their mother looking beatific and their disgruntled father looking uncomfortable in professorial tweed.   
  
“That doesn’t look like Stockbrigde,” the Master remarked.  
  
“Oh, we lived in Cambridge back then, but we went down every summer and lived here in Stockbridge. Though the children weren’t always stuck here— when John nicked his ship from the yard he took his sisters traveling. He likes a crowded TARDIS. But they all peeled off to live their own lives, in the end—I suppose they felt they had to, like Susan giving up Narnia and growing up.”  
  
“And since then?” the Master prompted. Unless they’d all been, like Verity, preserved beyond the natural span of their years, the children the Doctor had grown up with would have died centuries ago in his relative time line. Given the Doctor’s reverence for free will above all, the Master could extrapolate that girls had likely been allowed to choose whether they wanted to take advantage of that technology.   
  
Looking up, the Master could see pictures of at least three of them growing up and then growing old—several in which they stood next to a strangely young brother, or a never-changing, sad-eyed mother. Respecting his sisters’ decisions to age and die would have ground the sacredness of self-determination into the Doctor’s young consciousness. It didn’t excuse his fixation on the idea, but it did go some ways towards explaining his inflexibility on that point.  
  
“And ever since then,” Verity looked up at the photographs, “he’s managed to pick up wastrels like lint on a good black dress. Adric’s the latest I’ve met—a gifted mathematician from another universe, and an orphan. Adric traveled with him for a while, but when John came to visit us the time before last I asked him if a boy that young shouldn’t be in school. John acted as though it had never occurred to him, but now Adric’s off studying Maths at Warwick, and a good deal more settled. He visits us when he can.   
  
“That one’s Liz—she was at Cambridge with him. And that’s his niece, Josephine. Her mother was always his favorite—the sister who traveled with him the longest. He and Jo worked together when he was trapped here after that Zodin business. Of course Jo got married not terribly long ago—poor John hasn’t quite forgiven her for ‘abandoning him for the company of a supercilious Welshman,’ as he puts it.”   
  
“You make him sound so avuncular he could never have entertained the  _thought_  of  _any_ relationship,” the Master said, with a strange air, irony half hiding hope. Of course he recognized that the bulk of this could be deliberate evasion or misdirection on Verity’s part. But, provided she was essentially straightforward, he found it comforting that he wasn’t at the end (if even that, any more) of a long,  _long_  chain of disappointed lovers.   
  
“Avuncular enough that I’ve seen seven centuries without so much as the  _hint_  of a grandchild out of him,” Verity groused promptly. “Gallifreyan technology had sustained my life far beyond its natural bounds, but it can do nothing to bolster my patience. He adores children, he’s so good with them—stories, sweets from Raxacoricofallapatorius, Venusian lullabies. He so enjoys being an uncle, I don’t think he could help being a good father.  
  
“He works terribly hard, and he’s burned through so many regenerations—I can’t help but think he’d be safer, happier even, if he had someone. He tries to take care of all the young people traveling with him, and of all the places he goes, but there isn’t really anyone he lets take care of him. Perhaps he needs what Earth and I can’t readily give him—a partner. To spend his time with someone his own age, with comparable experience, who won’t be too over-awed by his brilliance and charisma to tell him when he’s being a silly ass.” She gave the Master a pointed look.  
  
“An interesting observation,” he said sharply. “I assume you’ve told the Doctor something similar, for all the good  _that_  will do. I can’t imagine, even as a child, that the remarks on his report card included ‘responds well to criticism.’” Abruptly, the Master stood up and walked to the window. .After a moment’s stiff silence, the Master seized on the nearest passing conversational topic.   
  
“You seem to be quite happily situated here. I’d like to know how you’ve managed it. You’re living here and now, in Stockbridge at the end of the millennia, and yet you seem to have done exactly that centuries ago in your personal timelines. Your husband’s in chronological synchronicity with the Doctor, and yet you managed to simultaneously raise a family between here and Cambridge.”  
  
“Oh, that—I like this millennia, you see, and we like Stockbridge. We’re settled very comfortably here, I’d hate to leave. And so we’re crossing our own time stream,” she said, as if that weren’t a capital time crime. “It’s a trick of my step-son’s. When the children were grown, I suggested looping back. Besides, we’d seen ourselves doing it, we already knew it would happen at some point.   
  
“My husband and I went back and settled in the Middle Ages, and so there have been Smiths in Stockbridge since time immemorial. Smiths that look an awful lot like the Smiths of the previous generation, but no one bothers about that in a small town like this. As I said, my husband and I look the same as we ever did, and so now that we’ve caught up with our younger selves, when we clear out to let them use the place everyone in town thinks it’s just the kids coming home for school holidays. They assume various older regenerations of my son are just other family members stopping by for a visit. It’s as easy as pie,” she said, sliding another bite of just that onto her fork.   
  
“As  _pi_?” The Master was completely lost now.  
  
“As P-I-E,” Verity corrected. “A baked pastry dough shell containing a sweet or savory filling.”  
  
“Ah yes!” The Master remembered this part. “Like the one made of shepherds.”  
  
“Hm. Well, not—”  
  
An explosion rattled the windowpanes. Verity calmly set her teacup down in its saucer. “That’ll be the children, then. I remember this visit—we let John drive once we got out into the country. This is about the time we discovered he’d taken that as permission to make a ‘few small modifications’ to the engine.”  
  
In the drive, a younger voice that was nonetheless unquestionably still Verity’s shrieked, “What do you mean, ‘it runs on  _jam_ ’?”   
  
A boy laughed awkwardly. “Mum… Really, it’s—”  
  
The Master pulled back the curtains, taking a look at the gangly blond teenager making the excuses. He was comically swallowed up by his large black tailcoat, but handsome enough when he shrugged it off his shoulders, revealing a waistcoat, pin-striped trousers, wing collar and bow tie. Some form of school uniform, the Master supposed. Clearly this was the foundation of his peculiar predilection for stripy trousers. The boy shoved his hands in his pockets defensivly. He frowned severely in response to an amused accusation from one of his sisters, the frown deepening almost into a pout. The Master missed him suddenly and bitterly. He turned around at a cough from Verity.   
  
“I’m afraid we’d better clear out,” she said quite gently. “I’ve got to drag my contemporary Sydney out of his lab, though heaven knows how I’ll manage to pry him off that neutrino-sorter you’ve patched up for him.   
  
“Of course,” the Master conceded, allowing Verity to show him the back door, and Sydney to shake his hand more firmly than might have been expected of someone so frail-looking.   
  
Standing at the edge of the wood where he had hidden his TARDIS, the Master looked back at the house. The drive was empty now, the family having apparently gone in as he himself left. Then the front door slammed, and the Doctor, so unbelievably young, bounded outside again and down the steps. He threw open the boot of the car, sorting through the parcels there. The Master wanted to shake him, grab him, kiss him, steal him away—but for the sake of their Time Streams he didn’t dare even wish him a forgettable ‘good day.’   
  
Besides, the Master reminded himself, he was just a child. Though, he mused, they  _had_  been born the same year in relative Gallifreyan time. Had they grown up together, the Master supposed this was about the age they might have begun to first consider each other as more than innocent playmates. He gave the boy a searching look, trying to see him through his own fifteen-year-old eyes. Brash, arrogant and unconventional. Decidedly handsome, in lean, laughing sort of way. Achingly, obviously still the Doctor.   
  
The Master concluded he would have been just as devastatingly taken with him as he found himself now. He felt cheated of those years, even as he was grateful for the ignorant autonomy he’d enjoyed while never suspecting that such a person as the Doctor existed. He’d been the master of his own will and desires until very recently—he suspected he’d never have been, had his thoughts been fixated on this ‘John’ from an early age.   
  
The Master waited for ‘John’ to select an assortment of bags, to slam the boot shut and to head into the house before he turned away. Back in his TARDIS the Master flicked the fast-return switch. Though this effort had met with failure, he was not without alternative means of attaining what he wanted. A slow smirk spread across his face as he contemplated his next move. He even cheered up so far as to chuckle softly when he imagined the moment the Doctor realized his ex-lover had put a contract out on him. His expression of delicious dismay alone would be beyond price.  
  
***  
  
At first, the Emperor of Hestin’s orders specified that the Doctor be taken alive and unharmed. After two months, they more curtly requested that he be returned  _alive._  This had its effect.   
  
The Master was nothing short of gleeful when his night staff put through a transmission from the Koban High Command. The Command had called to let the Emperor know that a man calling himself the Doctor was being held on one of their frigates and could be picked up at his convenience. They had a visual link—did the Master wish to confirm the identity of the prisoner?   
  
He dressed hurriedly, and was still straightening his collar when he walked into the command center. “Put it on screen,” the Master waved his hand at a young ops officer, taking the command chair from the security division head, who rose to make way for him. The Master leant forward, tapping his fingers on the arms of the chair, impatient for the signal to come through. With a few keystrokes a hologram snapped on, illustrating the frigate’s bridge in shallow relief. Three people, unaware of their observers, were being restrained by uniformed Koban troopers. The Master’s attention immediately fixed on the man on the far left. The picture was grainy, but it was unmistakably the Doctor.   
  
“Him again?” a red haired girl asked incredulously, evidently responding to something the troop commander had just told her. She craned her neck to look over at the Doctor. “This must be the fourth time—what did you  _do_  to this guy, Doc?”  
  
The Doctor had the decency to look chagrined. “I’d rather not discuss it,” he said primly, struggling in the grasp of his guards. “Could I ask you to move your hand? You’re cutting off the blood flow. Ah, thank you, there’s a good chap.”  
  
“He’s never been anything but polite to me,” said a brunette girl –surely that wasn’t Nyssa of Traken? The brunette looked resigned to being captured, as if it were a regular occurrence in her life. “Before he became our Keeper my father conducted trade negotiations with him. I’ve been a guest in his Palace many times.” She looked over at the Doctor. “Perhaps we should arrange a meeting to clear up the misunderstanding you mentioned.”  
  
The Doctor winced for reasons entirely unrelated to issues of blood flow. “No, Nyssa, I don’t think that would be—”  
  
A sudden explosion rocked the deck, and the Doctor was slammed to the floor. He caught himself with his hands and looked up at the ship’s captain. “I  _told_  you the gravity well was too intense. Your systems can’t handle the pressure. Listen, you must let me fix the dampeners, and to do that you  _have_  to let me into the engine room! Everything depends on it! Please!” There was a second explosion, and the Doctor struggled to his feet, gripping the console nearest to him. The emergency claxons kicked on and the feed cut out. The Master leaned back in his chair.  
  
“Trying to re-establish, sir.” The technician worried the keys. When, ten minutes later, she managed to get the image back, the bridge was conspicuously empty. His expression unreadable, the Master stood.  
  
“Call me when further word comes through,” he said. He turned and walked back to his bedroom. When, early in the morning, the Koban High Command communicated their deepest regrets that the prisoner had managed to escape, the Master cut the connection mid-apology. He lay back down, acutely conscious of the bed’s largeness. Naturally the Doctor had managed to save the crew of the frigate and secure his own liberty—he’d done much the same on every occasion on which he’d seemed close to capture. The Monin Host, for example, had only relented in their quest to tie him up in ribbons and leave him on the Master’s doorstep once he’d saved their world from a devastating temporal paradox.  
  
As infuriating and, the Master sometimes admitted to himself,  _painful_  as it was to watch the Doctor squirm out of his clutches time and again, it was also undeniably impressive.   
  
To the best of his admittedly incomplete intelligence, while on the run the Doctor had managed to avert no less than three major inter-stellar wars. He’d also helped the Skelarri rebel faction gain a key tactical victory, foiled a planned Cyberman invasion of Earth, and, through an amusing series of mistakes, won a Xeraphin beauty contest. This was not as much of a credit to his appearance as it might have been, given that, due to a recent, thoroughly  _un_ amusing series of mistakes, the Xeraphin now found themselves a single bioplasmic gestalt intelligence. As such they were formless, and largely incapable of competing in any contests of a physical nature—not even their own.   
  
If the Doctor had been fetchingly capable and dynamic whilst his prisoner, he was infinitely more so given free reign of the wider universe. The Master had appreciated what he knew of the Doctor’s accomplishments, but he could admit now that it had been a fond, patronizing sort of appreciation, based on a clearly insufficient estimation of the Doctor’s talents. He had considered the Doctor his equal, but now the Doctor was manifestly exactly that, and it required no such declaration from the Master to make it evident.  
  
Of course, this still didn’t justify his absurd escape. The Master would dearly love to wring a few regenerations out of his impressive little neck. As the weeks of humiliating, pining celibacy dragged on into months, his desire to do so grew stronger. The more he valued what he’d lost, the more keenly he wanted it back, and the more viciously he begrudged its absence. If the Doctor assumed the Master was calming down or forgetting him, he was sorely mistaken.   
  
A screeching Dalek voice interrupted his reverie, and the Master rolled over, pushing his face down into his pillow with a growl. When that wasn’t enough to block out the noise, he squirmed _under_  the pillow. His technicians had yet to comprehend, let alone undo, the clever trick the Doctor had managed with the sensor ghosts. At random intervals a faux invasion force squawked and blustered over the communication system, and the sensors detected a variety of nonexistent Dalek incursions. It was absolutely maddening. As if he weren’t dwelling on it already, the breakdowns served to constantly remind the Master not only of the Doctor’s absence, and the added horror of his lover having jilted him quite visibly before the entire Palace staff.   
  
The Master himself had been too preoccupied (with hunting the Doctor, rather than the state business he knew he’d been neglecting of late) to take a proper look at the fault. Besides, he was at a disadvantage to the saboteur—it was always easier to break something than to repair it.   
  
The alarms silenced, and the Master irrationally hoped they’d finished for the night. He poked his head out from under the pillow tentatively.  
  
“SURRENDER!! SURRENDER TO THE—”  
  
The Master groaned, grabbed his pillow, and stomped off into his TARDIS to sleep, vowing to follow up on the lead Nyssa of Traken had presented him with in the morning.  
  
***  
  
According to the gossip a Traken Council member had leaked to the Master’s ambassador, the Doctor had managed to talk the Keeper of Traken out of holding him. Hestin was Traken’s principal trading partner, and such strong ties  _should_  have prevented Traken from acting expressly against the Emperor’s interests. Tremas, however, had always been a willful man, even before he became the supreme authority of the Union.   
  
The Master tapped his foot impatiently. Ravel’s Bolero was stuck in his head, and it was working its way out through his body. A  _human_  composer—the Doctor truly had infected him. When at last the Keeper shimmered grandly into visibility before him, the Master glared at the aged reflection of his own face.   
  
“Ah,” the Keeper studied him, not without amusement. “I trust you’re here about that Doctor fellow who came calling.”  
  
“What part of ‘detain him at all costs’ did you interpret as ‘send him on his merry way with a fresh assistant and sandwiches for the road’? I was under the impression that you and I had something of an understanding, Tremas.”  
  
The older-looking man chucked. “Don’t look so put out—you resemble me at that age having a strop. I can’t take you seriously at all.”  
  
The Master grit his teeth. “I hardly chose to regenerate in the manner I did.”  
  
“No,” Tremas smirked, “but I think it suits you remarkably well. Besides, I’ve chosen to interpret it as flattery. And as to our understanding—come now, Master. I like you a great deal and consider you a good friend and ally, but you  _are_  a dictator, and as such your personal vendettas are hardly a trustworthy means of identifying public enemies. In this case, quite the opposite. I found the Doctor very agreeable. He managed, in the course of his stay here, and with the assistance of my wife Cassia, to put an end to a most barbaric ancient practice of ours which had long been a blight on the serenity of our capital. Perhaps, in your haste to accuse me of abetting your fugitive, you did not notice that the Melkur grove has been abolished? The Doctor took objection to the practice and argued passionately against it. I took his counsel to heart.”   
  
“I’m amazed your ossified society managed to change so much as its letterhead, let alone anything which ‘tradition’ had managed to encrust with dignity,” the Master growled. He was frustrated by the Keeper’s attempts to shift the discussion, but unable to avoid putting in a bid for the position he normally took in such arguments with Tremas.   
  
“Well, this Doctor of yours is a rather remarkable man. Rumor has it you thought so as well.”   
  
The Master gave him a poisonous look and opened his mouth to respond, but Tremas cut him off. “Don’t be so vexed, you know how difficult it is to keep the goings-on in a palace the size of yours a secret—and by all accounts you were hardly interested in discretion. The situation is as I expected, and I’ve no intention of interfering in a lovers’ quarrel, on either side.”  
  
“You’ve already interfered, Keeper. I leave you empty-handed,” the Master pointed out. “The Doctor managed to pick up a new traveling companion during the encounter. For all your talk of neutrality, I doubt he counts  _his_  visit here as a loss.”   
  
Tremas raised an eyebrow. “I’m afraid my Nyssa has had a difficult time adjusting to my assumption of the Keepership. I can no longer be simply her father, and while she and her step-mother are fond of each other, there is little for her here now. The Doctor offered her a chance to further her education, and to travel. He admitted there might be danger in accompanying him, but Nyssa believed she would be working in the service of something greater than her own life, and so she chose to encounter it. Though as her father I might have wished to keep her here, as her Keeper I could only honor her decision. She is a woman grown now, but even still—tell me honestly. Can you think of any reason I should not have entrusted the Doctor with my child?”  
  
“Why I should tell you?” the Master sneered.   
  
“Perhaps you have a point,” Tremas admitted, “I have not been generous to you. But despite having known the Doctor only a short while, I felt I could not betray him. That was unfair to you, and I am sorry for it. But I cannot be ashamed of it.”  
  
The Master glowered at the base of Tremas’s golden throne for a while before speaking. “Your daughter is quite safe. The Doctor is what he seems—an insufferably good man.” The Master did not add that he had hoped to entrust his own children to him.  
  
Watching him, and recognizing the lost look on his face in a way no one else could have, Tremas took pity—of course the Master could never simply  _ask_  how his lover had seemed, and if Tremas didn’t volunteer the information, in all likelihood he’d just steal security camera footage and comb the grainy holofeed for clues.  
  
“Tell me Master, do you think of this Doctor of yours as having a melancholic temperament?”  
  
The Master was taken aback. “Somewhat reserved, perhaps, but hardly  _melancholy.”_  The Doctor’s joie de vivre was one of his most attractive qualities.   
  
“Hm.” Tremas pursed his lips. “Suppose I told you that the man I met was positively grave? He seemed pleasant—short tempered at times, but otherwise infallibly polite. But he was withdrawn. As if determined to bear some great disappointment. A man who had reconciled himself to never being entirely happy.”  
  
The Master started. “I’d say we were speaking of different people.”  
  
Tremas raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think he could be mistaken for anyone else?”  
  
“No,” the Master conceded. “He’s…” maddeningly incomparable, the Master thought. “Distinctive in his dress, if nothing else.” He drew himself up and said sharply, “And you have no further information regarding his whereabouts?”   
  
Tremas gave him a dubious look, as though they’d already cleared this point up—he hadn’t given the Doctor away earlier, and he had no intentions of rectifying his error.   
  
The Master signed. “I only intend to speak to him, Tremas. He has nothing to fear from me.”  
  
“Oh, I don’t doubt it, though I’m sure he’d feel differently. As it happens, I believe you. But I’m afraid I cannot help you. You’ll simply have to attempt to contact him through other means.”  
  
***  
  
Dressed as always in black, the Master paced back and forth in front of yet another row of bounty hunters. The Doctor would have made a joke about how this was very Star Wars, the Master mused, but the Doctor wasn’t here.   
  
The Master had redoubled his efforts after his spectacularly unsuccessful interview with Tremas of Traken. He’d charged Hestin’s internal security forces to find the Doctor with little result, and so the Master was holding this briefing to acquaint the absolute best people in the field with the problem. He was offering a king’s ransom—enough to buy two goodish star systems, or perhaps one outstanding one.   
  
Of course the Master knew he’d do a better job tracking the Doctor himself, but he ran an empire, and an empire’s influence stretches even further than its actual borders. If the Doctor wanted to travel anywhere within a wide sector of space he had to visit the time period the Master occupied, due to his TARDIS’s unwillingness to violate the two Time Lords’ chronological synchronicity. And the Doctor had been cleverer than to leave Hestin’s sphere of influence for long. While he remained in temporal synchronicity with the Master’s Empire, the Master couldn’t run off to chase him without abandoning his throne for however long the pursuit took. He’d lose everything he’d worked towards for centuries, his lives’ ambition, and when he finally attained his prize he would be incapable of offering the Doctor so much as a square meter of land as a bridal gift. The Master hoped he could never be reconciled to giving the Doctor that satisfaction, but the calculus of desperation’s results were looking grimmer by the day.   
  
And so it seemed the Master would have to subcontract out to professionals. If the Doctor felt the insult of being fetched like a runaway pet picked up by the pound rather than personally pursued, so much the better.   
  
He knew that those professionals would be able to track the Doctor more easily if they knew they were hunting a Time Lord, but if he made that common knowledge, listed it as another bullet point on the wanted posters, he would be betraying the Doctor to the CIA. Lifetimes’ carefully guarded anonymity could be spoilt. The paranoid, controlling CIA, which prided itself on keeping Gallifreyans in line even more than it did on keeping the rest of the universe similarly in order, would feel  _had_ , would feel like rubes, and would pursue the Doctor with a vengeance to assuage that embarrassment.   
  
Such a disclosure would make the galaxy a more dangerous place for the Doctor to roam without the Master’s protection, and could force him to return home. It would also put the Doctor in danger, and if he was more stubborn than prudent, as per usual, the CIA might catch up with him before the Master could. As furious as he was, and as much as he wanted the Doctor to suffer for having made a fool of him and abandoned him, a cosmos without the infuriating bastard scarcely bore thinking about. No, the Master had no intention of ever publicizing the Doctor’s background.   
  
“My once-and-future chief scientific adviser is not to be taken lightly,” he concluded, looking around at the motley group. “He may look young. He may  _seem_  disarmingly innocuous. But trust me, for I have the benefit of considerable experience with the man—if he is allowed the _slightest_  slack, he will wriggle through your nets, no matter how capable you consider yourselves to be. And his technical expertise—” the faux Dalek sensor ghosts flared to life, predicting four simultaneous Dalek incursions, interrupting the Master, alarming the assembled bounty hunters, and prompting the Master’s staff to wearily pull out and don thick headphones to continue about their business, “is without parallel,” the Master finished with grim bitterness.  
  
  
***

A NOTE REGARDING CHAPTERING: I know I've bumped up to eight chapters from five and then from seven, and I am heartily sorry for being a tease re: that. The ending IS all written, and you can expect Chapter Seven Part II within the next day or so, whereupon I'll post this chapter to comms and take this post off f-lock. Chapter 8 is also finished, barring a few pages of epilogue. I expect to finish it and have it off to beta today, and probably to have it posted within a week. The problem with posting everything at once was that is was just too BIG, both for individual posts (all told chapters 7 and 8 would have taken three or four, given the lj character limits) and for the poor beleaguered beta to get through all in one quick go.   
  
So with some minor waiting, here's fic:  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The Crane Wife   
Chapter 7, Part II  
  
  
  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
Smatters and Greig were the best in the bounty biz—or so Smatters regularly insisted. In actuality, while in the top twenty, they were regularly out-performed by Cnrakk the Crusher, the rogue robot Unit 9-Blue (who cared only for the electric thrills of spiked memory chips and the paid company of large-breasted ginger women), and Steve Mott, a mild-mannered postal worker from Boshane who had retired to pursue his bounty hunting hobby and enjoyed the collection of 1) exotic stamps, and 2) the exotic scalps of his targets (his wife mounted them in an attractive fashion in the den, so as not to clash with the upholstery).   
  
Smatters liked to think of himself as the publicity man, suave and popular with attractive beings of any gender, species or sort. He liked to think of the silently capable Grieg as his Tonto. Grieg, who had not spoken a word in ten years for reasons of his own, preferred not to think of Smatters at all, if he could possibly help it.   
  
It was with typical forbearance he endured Smatters rambling monologue about the briefing they’d just left.   
  
“Chief scientific advisor my arse,” Smatters chortled to himself, waving the datapack’s holophoto of the Doctor at his colleague. “You ever see anyone that young with that many doctorates under his belt, let alone rise to that sort of position? You ever see this kind of price tag on a lab lackey? Mark me, Greig my lad, this Doctor fellow’s never gotten off the Master’s cock for long enough to have an opinion about a test tube in the whole term of his employment here. The Emperor’s toy’s left in a huff and no mistake. ‘Tween you, me and the holophoto here, we’d be right fools not to take advantage of having a pretty bit like that frightened ‘n in our custody—our company, I should say. Reckon we could get ‘im to do quite a bit if we promised not to take him back to the right nasty piece o’ work he’s run away from. Not that we’d have to follow through, mind.   
  
“Now, this Master’s a clever man, and he knows he could be squeezed a bit more even than he’s offering to ransom a lover rather than an employee. Like as not he knows the boy’s back on the open market as well, and doesn’t want anyone sampling the wares who hasn’t already, so he’s keeping mum about the oldest profession bit. There could be even more money in this than it looks, Greig, not to mention the aforementioned wares.”  
  
Greig cleared his throat loudly.  
  
“Now Greig, you know as not to interrupt me when I’m thinkin’! He’s probably dim as a burst bulb, warnings aside—that Master’s just tryin’ to throw us off the scent, like.”   
  
Greig cleared his throat  _frantically_.  
  
“Greig I’ve  _told_  ye—”  
  
“Oh, I think you should listen to your friend,” a too-calm voice rumbled from behind Smatters. “I believe he’s trying to tell you something rather important.”  
  
Smatters paled. From the fact that he hadn’t been knifed in the back, he imagined the Master had only come upon them about the time the first frog in Greig’s throat had made its presence known. From the way the Master picked him up bodily, Smatters concluded that had been damning enough, regardless.   
  
“Sir,  _Sire_ , really, I—” Smatters struggled in his grip like a fish on a line.   
  
“I came to mention a few pertinent details I’d forgotten, but it strikes me that I might as well provide a practical demonstration. This,” the Master pushed a button and flung open a panel, “is our waste disposal system—do you like it?” He swung and held Smatters over the long drop and squeezed his neck with his leather-gloved hand, cutting off the airflow so the man would stop his whining. “I imagine you haven’t much of an eye for engineering, but nevertheless, it’s impressive, even to the lay person. Attractive, discreet, efficient. The Doctor designed it, you see, andit’s  _very_  safe,. In fact,it’s impossible to disengage the safeties preventing you from disposing of living organic material unless you have high priority access codes.  _These_  access codes-” The Master removed one hand from the dangling man’s throat and keyed something into the pad beside the chute.  
  
Smatters struggled in his grasp, wide-eyed and choking.   
  
“Now, the most impressive thing about these units is that how efficiently they recycle. They deconstruct the very molecules of material thrown away and reconstruct them into new, element-sorted component blocks for use in replication. They could, for example, rip your body into shreds, sort you into neat stacks and make you into lunch and half a dozen chairs without wasting an atom. Terribly clever…”   
  
Greig, impassive but not unimpressed, watched Smatters smack at the Master’s arms in a futile effort to force the man to drop him.  
  
“That cleverness is very typical of your quarry. And for a man who claims to abhor violence, he certainly does leave an incredible trail of casualties in his wake. I fear you’ve failed to understand the Doctor—my chief scientific adviser. He is even cleverer than he seems. He is naturally mendacious, uncannily resourceful, and almost inconceivably lucky. At your own peril, he is  _not_  to be underestimated.” The Master loosened his grip just enough so that Smatters could gasp, then drew him forward, away from the shaft.  
  
“Thank you, thank you sir,” Smatters gasped.   
  
The Master grinned savagely. “And neither am I.” Without warning he grabbed Smatters by the shoulders and smashed his head into the metal wall three times, until the man lost consciousness, and let him go abruptly. Smatters slid to the floor, and the Master took a step back, pulled at his jacket to straighten it, and glanced over at Greig.   
  
“The only reason he’s not dead is that, for some unfathomable reason, the pair of you are considered to be excellent at what you do. It seems as though you bear the burden of thought for the both of you, so let me make it clear to you that if so much of a whisper of the Doctor’s mistreatment at your hands reaches me—or if I so much as  _suspect_  the pair of you of tampering with him, I will leave you ever so much worse than dead.” The Master smiled pleasantly and swept off down the corridor. “Good luck, gentlemen.”   
  
Smatters, coming round, groaned an acknowledgement from the floor. Greig rolled his eyes and started to drag him back in the direction the Master had initially come from, towards the hanger and their ship.  
  
Hours later, in flight, Smatters ventured a comment.  
  
“Told ya he was his lover, didn’t I?”  
  
After a moment’s pause, Greig’s large, still lips stirred, and a voice like a rumble of rock dustily creaked into motion. “Smatters?”  
  
Stunned, Smatters blinked at him, and offered a tentative, “Yer?”   
  
“Shut up.” Greig looked back to the screen, shut his mouth, and for a full minute, stayed silent.  
  
“If you was going to talk, why didn’t you say something back there when that crazy Master bloke was right behind me?” Smatters drew himself up indignantly.  
  
Greig gave a deep sigh and tuned out the sound of his partner whining about the injustice he had been done. He focused instead on the peaceful expanse of space in the viewscreen and the task before him.   
  
Greig had very good instincts, and his years of silent observation had given him a real knack for understanding people. The way the Master spoke of their prey– indeed his entire demeanor (which had been passionate to the point of verging on the murderous) indicated a deep, genuine attachment that could well be mutual. Why the Doctor had left was no concern of Greig’s, but it didn’t take an experienced professional to guess where you were likely to find people licking their wounds after they’d broken it off with their boyfriends.  
  
***  
  
Bernice Summerfield felt that Milliways Restaurant at the End of the Universe was a bit of a tourist trap. Their  _bar_ , on the other hand—that deserved all its good press and a bit extra. She was bearing a ‘Sex on the Deadly Glass Beaches of Marinus’ away from it when she knocked into someone who wasn’t paying enough attention to where he was going.  
  
“Hey, watch it!” Benny protested, managing to steady the glass before a drop spilled with skill born of long practice.  
  
“Oh, terribly sorry!” A familiar blond head whipped around, and familiar blue eyes widened with pleased surprise. “Professor Summerfield! How delightfully—wait, you’re not here on a _mission_ , are you?” His eyes had flared and then contracted to slits so quickly Bernice could have sworn the lids were spring-loaded.  
  
“Er. Not that I’m aware of? A mission to forget an annoying dig with the aid of about seven more of these?” Bernice laughed, obviously confused, and the Doctor visibly relaxed.  
  
“No, I didn’t think you would be, or that  _he’d_ — anyway.” The Doctor shook his head and smiled charmingly. “Won’t you join me? My companions and I are just over there—I was fetching Tegan a Bloody Mary, but it seems they’ll send it over as soon as the barman’s scrounged up Worchester sauce, as they seem to have run out.”   
  
“Tegan?”  
  
“A traveling companion of mine, and a very good friend. I’m with her, a chap called Turlough, and Nyssa of Traken, at the moment—we’ve just come from the theater. Well, more precisely from a performance of  _The Importance of Being Earnest_  that was interrupted in the second act by Sontaarans, who suspected that in addition to not actually being named Earnest, Algy was a Rutan scientist-turned-conscientious objector, in possession of valuable information. Strangely enough they were absolutely right. The holiday I’d promised my companions was, consequently, rather spoilt. I offered to make amends by treating them to a good dinner out. You like Wilde a great deal, if I remember?”  
  
“Not  _quite_  my period, but yes, who doesn’t?” Bernice smiled. “I know for a fact the Master’s a fan—remember he tried some terrible ‘to lose two fragments of the coronet of Rassilon looks like carelessness’ line out on me on that last dig I did for him? Cheapest shot since the well drink specials. Admittedly, I  _did_  almost deserve it.”   
  
Bernice toyed with her straw and wondered whether she could wrangle a dinner invitation out of the Doctor. They were charming company, but more importantly the Master kept an excellent table, and had a wine cellar to match. “I’m surprised he isn’t with you. Affairs of state?”  
  
“Hm?” The Doctor seemed to find a patch of the carpet terribly interesting. “Oh, I’m afraid I wouldn’t know. Shall we sit? Tiring day of running after Rutans and all that—you know, they have rather an unfair advantage, between the floating and the hovering.”  
  
The Doctor’s prattling was as suspicious as if he’d been wearing a huge spatter of fresh blood instead of a stick of celery.   
  
“What do you mean ‘you wouldn’t know’? Have you two had a row?”  
  
“Oh no,” the Doctor’s expression was too innocent, “nothing of that sort.” He smiled fixedly, waiting for Benny to take the hint and change the topic of her own accord. Benny very pointedly did not take any such thing. The Doctor shoved his hands in his back pockets, and his frock coat was pushed back and out by the motion. He looked like nothing so much as an indignant disturbed goose. “I managed to escape. Won’t you sit down? I’m afraid we’re becoming something of a traffic obstruction—”  
  
If the Doctor thought Bernice Summerfield was going to be pressured by her ancient British heritage into politely sitting down, and then politely avoiding discussing the Doctor’s private affairs in front of mixed company and/or children, he had clearly never visited her native Beta Caprisis. Yes, they still had fish and chips shops, but they’d strayed so far from the ways of their ancestors that they even talked on public transport. Benny was not a woman to be so easily derailed, not even by the Doctor’s mastery of passive-aggressive English manipulation. Several patrons and waiters turned around as Bernice shrieked, “You did  _what_?!”  
  
“I escaped my enslavement,” the Doctor said coldly, as if annoyed that he should have to discuss it.  
  
“You  _left him_?” Bernice gaped. “But—but the two of you—”  
  
“I was sold to a dictator at a slave auction. I consequently managed to rescue myself. That seems natural enough to me.” The Doctor’s irritation melted slightly, and he tried a pleading tone. “He’s probably cooled down by now—in fact, it’s been weeks since I’ve run into any of his hired help. I thought you might have been embroiled in all this nonsense, but clearly you haven’t heard anything about it.  
  
“I’m getting paranoid in my old age—I thought that was what Turlough was after for a while as well, but it turned out he was trying to kill me for  _entirely_  different reasons. But that’s all sorted now. Similarly, any wounds to the Master’s pride will heal in time, but, for the moment, I think discretion’s the better part of valor, and I’m giving Hestin Prime a sensible berth. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention having seen me, just in case. …Professor Summerfield? Bernice?”   
  
Bernice was gaping at him, completely stupefied. “You are the most  _idiotic_  genius I know.” The Doctor looked quite taken aback, and Bernice raised a finger to poke him in the skinny chest. “ ‘Cool down?’ The Master’s probably ripping the system apart to get at you!”  
  
The Doctor fidgeted, tossing back a bit of hair that had fallen forward into his face. He frowned, worry lurking around his eyes. “You’re over-reacting. He wouldn’t do anything that might foolishly jeopardize his empire.” The Doctor squared his jaw. “And I’m certain he’s found other diversions and forgotten all about me. Or will very shortly. He’s a resourceful, adaptable man with a lot of prestige and ready money, after all. I’m sure he could make someone with a broken moral compass very happy.”  
  
Bernice was an archeologist by hard-won experience, and from the ruins of a household spread before her, she could sniff out the root of the catastrophe that had destroyed it. While the evidence in this case was less obvious than, say, if she were sitting surrounded by people-shaped magma shells in Pompeii and felt she could call lava and go back to camp for a drink, Bernice still felt the pull of causation. She took a meditative sip of her tiny-umbrella-decked drink, studying the supremely uncomfortable Time Lord before her.  
  
“Why did you leave when you did?”  
  
The Doctor cast about for his friends, as if hoping to make eye contact and elicit a social rescue. “I don’t know what you mean,” he murmured. “I escaped when I could.”  
  
“Really? Because you seemed to have the run of the palace when I visited you, and if appearances were deceiving, you could have caught a ride with me if you’d needed to seek asylum. If you’d told me you were being mistreated, I’d have done anything I could to help you, and I think you understood that, or at least could and should have guessed it.” Benny finished her drink in a long pull. “I suppose I assumed a super-genius being treated like the Master’s wife could fend for himself.   
  
The Doctor winced visibly, and Bernice’s eyes widened—then she choked on an ice cube. Managing to spit it back out, she looked up at him, blinking wildly. “Oh, you  _didn’t_.”  
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
  
“Oh come on! When I implied you two were acting more than a little  _married_ , your face went the color of your celery. He  _proposed_!”  
  
The Doctor tried to scoff, but ruined it slightly by squeaking on his “That’s preposterous!”  
  
“Oh you’ve  _really_  done it.” Bernice’s hand—the one not holding her drink—drifted to her hip without her conscious volition. “Forget hunting you until you’re dead—he won’t have forgiven you regenerations from now!”   
  
“I really don’t think it’s that bad,” the Doctor insisted.  
  
“Beggin’ your pardon, Doctor,” a male voice and a gun muzzle at the Doctor’s temple interrupted “’Fraid it almost certainly is, sir. Messers Smatters and Greig at your service, sir. And ma’mn.” Smatters gave Bernice a decidedly smarmy smile—he hadn’t been told not to interfere with  _her_  on pain of death, had he?  
  
Bernice looked seasick. Greig rolled his eyes. The Doctor simply looked long-suffering.  
  
“Not  _again_ ,” he muttered, and then cleared his throat. “And who might you be?”  
  
“As I said sir, Smatters and Greig. Appropriations, Kidnappings, Retrievals, Catering, Petty Work and Odd Jobs. You’re a Retrieval, sir, and a bit of an Odd Job, if you don’t mind my saying so.”  
  
“Catering?” the Doctor repeated incredulously.  
  
“Greig here’s a daft hand with an origami napkin swan.” Smatters tilted his head at his partner. “Come up an unlikely number of times, that has. I says to him, ‘Why not include it in our curriculum vitae, then?’ And Greig here, he says nothing at all most years, ‘cept when it’s too late to do his partner any good, and so now it’s printed in Extraneous Skills. Never you mind that, sir. A certain gentleman’s very anxious about your well-being, sir. Asked us to bring you home, he did, and we said we’d be happy to oblige him, for a very generous fixed sum.”  
  
“You know, I hate to say I told you so—” Benny began.  
  
“Then  _don’t_ ,” the Doctor snapped.   
  
***  
  
  
A loud ping sounded from the device on his wrist, and the Master excused himself from the briefing. He walked as quickly as dignity would allow, slipped into the wall-paneling, and ran back to his own suite, where he could flip on monitoring equipment. He drummed his fingers impatiently, waiting for the picture to flicker to life. His eyes flared when it finally did, at his first real-time glimpse of the Doctor in months.   
  
He looked well: hog tied in a chair to some woman in the middle of a nice restaurant and quite embarrassed about it, but otherwise well. Wait a minute, was the woman Professor Summerfield? Well, he supposed the restaurant in question probably had a bar, and so it stood to reason the Doctor might’ve found Benny in her natural habitat. Of course they might have come together. The Master tried not to consider that possibility and its implications.   
  
The Master hadn’t trusted any of his bounty hunters not to accost the Doctor and take him to an undisclosed location while they held out for a still-higher ransom. He had demanded they come to the Palace largely so he could plant burr-probes on their ships—microscopic spying equipment that unobtrusively burrowed under the metal plating and the skin of the freelancers. Upon encountering a pre-arranged stimulus—in this case a Gallifreyan bio-pattern—the burr probes transmitted a carrier wave back to the Master, allowing him to view the encounter.   
  
“Fantastic,” Professor Summerfield groused, trying to turn her head the required 180 degrees to glare at the Doctor. “It just figures that the moment I run into you, my dinner plans go to hell. They do a really creepy cow-that-wants-you-to-eat-it here, which come to think of it looks uncannily like you, but I think it might actually be  _less_  masochistic than you.”  
  
“Thank you for  _that_  comparison, but I hardly asked for this,” the Doctor countered, trying ineffectually to wriggle out of his bindings.  
  
“Yes, Doctor,” the Master chuckled to himself. “Squirm like a worm on a hook!” Of course the Master realized that taunting your ex-lover who can’t hear you doing it was simply a more malevolent form of talking to yourself, and as such could well be considered mad, but he was finding it terrible therapeutic.  
  
“Oh come on, you  _dumped_  the Master. That’s practically an engraved invitation. You could send out for a badge. ‘Ask me about my predilection for being accosted by bounty hunters!’”  
  
“I did not  _dump_  him,” the Doctor corrected, with a blush. “You can’t  _dump_  your captors. This is ridiculous - why do I  _never_  remember to bring my sonic screw driver with me when I leave the TARDIS?”  
  
“I mean you could’ve waited and left him at the altar if you were  _really_  interested in this sort of entertainment—” Bernice sighed, slipping back into a less frustrated tone. “I’m not saying you’re not right: of course he’s, well, a bit mad—”  
  
The Master frowned at this. “You’re in no position to criticize our relative degrees of sanity, Summerfield,” he muttered to himself. “I’m not the one who attempted to wear stilettos on an archeological site.”   
  
“But he’s—and he can never found out I’ve said this—really not so bad, as far as megalomaniacs go. It’s even possible he deserves to be happy—are you even sure this is what  _you_  want?”   
  
Benny’s sympathetic look couldn’t quite find the Doctor at this angle, and it landed instead on a passing young waiter. He took it as a come on and, despite the hostage situation, was interested enough to gather his courage and alert the captured man’s friends, seated in the other wing of the restaurant and wondering where the Doctor had gotten to, to his predicament, and to help them formulate a plan.  
  
“It’s not a question of what I want,” the Doctor said dismissively.   
  
The Master leaned back in his chair and rolled his eyes. “How terribly convenient for you.”  
  
“It’s a matter of what I have to do,” the Doctor continued to insist on screen. “Besides, you seem to be forgetting that, then as now, I was not in the situation of my own free will.” The Doctor nodded at the silent, bugged Greig, and, with unconscious irony, at the watching Master. “Perhaps you think I should jump into bed with him as well? Make an honest villain of him?”  
  
“Do you miss him?” Benny asked sharply.   
  
“No,” the Doctor said automatically. “No. Of course I don’t.” He paused for a long moment, and then murmured, “That would be absolutely ridiculous.”  
  
The Master leaned forward, studying his face closely. The Doctor turned his head away.   
  
“No,” Benny said with forced cheer. “I don’t miss my ex-husband Jason either. I mean we run into each other from time to time, meet civilly and,” she coughed, “shake hands, but I certainly don’t—”  
  
The Master groaned over her diatribe, both because it was preventing the Doctor from speaking further, and because he’d heard this all before.   
  
“Shut up, you stupid woman!” he growled. “Everyone knows you and Jason have more sex now than you did while you were married!”  
The Doctor laughed slightly at something she’d said, but then his face clouded, and he lowered his voice.  
  
“Actually—” But then he stopped. He seemed prepared to confide in Professor Summerfield, however, and the Master turned up the volume.  
  
“What is it? Go on?” She nudged his shoulder encouragingly.  
  
“About the Master—the thing is—” the Doctor started.   
  
Smatters wandered into frame and the Doctor shut his mouth, turning his attention to is (current) captor.   
  
“No!” the Master wailed at the injustice of the universe. “No, no, no, you were just about to  _say_ something—”  
  
But it was too late—the Doctor was listening to Smatters detailing his arrangements. “So I’ve gotten the stasis chamber up and running again—that ought to keep him quiet and out of trouble for the trip back. Greig, if you’ll help me carry him-- _augh_!”  
  
Smatters collapsed, to the floor, and the Master’s camera angle shifted wildly as Gerig did too. Something sludgy and red dripped across the frame, and the Master wondered if Greig had been bludgeoned. If so he was exceedingly unlikely to retrieve the Doctor.  
  
“Damn,” the Master cursed, pounding his fist on the desk.   
  
“That worked better than I’d expected, thank you Tegan,” Nyssa of Traken’s voice floated over the shaking camera, and what must have been the writhing, groaning bodies of the bounty hunters.   
  
“You didn’t think extra spicy Bloody Mary to the eyes via a soda siphon would  _hurt_?” an Australian voice, apparently belonging to the aforementioned Tegan, asked with amusement. “A girl should always carry some pepper spray around in her bag if she can help it. Same basic principle.”  
  
A male voice whined “Doctor, who are these men? Why did they want to capture you?” A young man in a school uniform wandered into view and toed a downed bounty hunter with his black brogue. He also tried his best to look like he wasn’t desperately staring at the tied-up Doctor with adolescent lust, which the Doctor seemed entirely oblivious to.   
  
The Master saw red. That was largely because the Bloody Mary had dripped all over the microscopic camera now, obscuring his view. In addition to that, however, the very idea of the Doctor leaving him and consequently acquiring a sarky,  _younger_  male companion with homicidal tendencies (and given that the Doctor had quite demonstratively appreciated  _him_  for some time, the Master felt secure in guessing the Doctor had something of a penchant for ‘sarcastic and murderous’) and a costume that was no doubt fetish bait for someone who’d had his sexuality shaped by, as he put it, ‘attending Eaton’ left the Master less than pleased.   
  
“I’ll explain later.” The Doctor barely glanced at the boy, but the Master was not entirely mollified.   
  
“Hello,” the young waiter who’d been helping them moved forward to untie the Doctor and Benny—starting with Benny. “I’m Alfred.”  
  
“Oh, um, Benny—” she began, “thanks for the help!”  
  
“It seemed like a better idea than your standard chat up line,” Alfred admitted.  
  
“‘What’s a girl like you doing tied to a chair in a place like this?’”   
  
“Points for style, surely,” the Doctor put in, standing and brushing himself off. “Thank you, Alfred. Professor Summerfield—”  
  
“Benny,” she corrected.  
  
“Benny,” the Doctor agreed with a smile. “Always a pleasure.” One of the bounty hunters at his feet began to moan, and the Doctor gingerly stepped over him. “Sorry, must dash. Everyone back to the TARDIS!”  
  
“Could I catch a ride with you back to the Braxiatel Collection?” Benny asked. “It’ll be quicker than renting a shuttle.”  
  
“Hah!” the Master said, having done enough trawling through the archives of the Doctor’s TARDIS to suspect that wouldn’t be the case. But he began to seriously worry about the dark turn all this was taking.   
  
“Not to mention I’m a bit short on cash at the moment,” Benny admitted.  
  
The Master sat up straight, willing the Doctor to flutter off like the magpie he was. While Braxiatel was a renegade of sorts as well, and as such it wasn’t likely that he’d turn the Doctor in to the CIA, the Doctor had, by his own admission, never met another Time Lord. When compared only against humans, the Master could hardly fail to appear even more excessively impressive than he did when viewed in his proper context. He wanted to remain in that flattering light.   
  
Braxiatel grated on the Master’s sensibilities, but it was impossible to deny that he was very clever, possessed a smooth, seductive sort of voice, and had an entire Collection of glittering cultural artifacts at his disposal—and a lot of money to purchase more with besides. If the Master’s own experience was any guide, the Doctor was highly interested in cleverness, seductive voices and priceless artwork. The Master felt that the Doctor meeting Braxiatel would be the worst possible consequence of this botched kidnapping attempt.   
  
“You never said you worked for Brax!” The Doctor seemed astonished. “So  _that’s_  who sent you to steal the mosaic—oh, that makes  _perfect_  sense now. Of course he would.”  
  
“You know Irving Braxiatel?” Benny blinked.   
  
“How?!” Unheard and horrified, the Master backed her up.  
  
“I could hardly escape the acquaintance. Brax is my brother. Well, not as bad as all that—my half brother.”  
  
“You’re joking,” Benny said.  
  
“ _Please_  be joking,” the Master pleaded. He suddenly remembered Verity having mentioned a step-son in connection with her time loop. The Master felt he’d been a fool not to realize what that might mean earlier. The Master took it all back. Finding out  _this_  was the worst possible consequence of this botched kidnapping attempt.  
  
“I’ve often wished my parents were,” the Doctor admitted, “but I’m afraid it’s all true.”  
  
The Master understood that the Doctor had felt it unimportant to mention other family members under the general heading of Time Lords I Have Met, but he felt deceived nonetheless. Could he really continue to lust after the supremely annoying  _Braxiatel’s_  maddeningly appetizing little brother?  
  
Horrified, the Master realized he most certainly could. Not even the image of Brax’s smarmy smug-git grin on the Doctor’s face could entirely kill the attraction—though it did come close.   
  
Professor Summerfield and the Doctor strode off, deep in conversation about their mutual friend. With a deep sigh and ill grace, the Master began the long process of reconciling himself to inviting the only Time Lord who rivaled his paramour for insufferability to the wedding.  
  
***  
  
Two days later, the Master looked up from his office desk at the sound of a footstep to find Professor Bernice Summerfield standing awkwardly in the door, holding what appeared to be a pint of ice cream and a bottle of alcohol. She cleared her throat.   
  
“I don’t expect you want to, er, talk.”  
  
“No.” The Master’s lip twitched in amusement, which he tried to disguise as complete unconcern.  
  
“Thought not. I’ll just leave these here, and, well. Good luck.” Benny tentatively pushed the items onto the Master’s desk and backed out of the door.   
  
The Master picked up the tub and examined it, contemplatively.  
  
Later that evening, Bernice received a terse message demanding to know where’d she’d purchased this ‘Chubby Hubby.’ She smiled and, with tact, said nothing that could be interpreted as sympathetic—simply texted the Master directions to the nearest Tesco-Galactic-Express.   
  
  
***  
  
  
“It’s too  _slow,_ ” the Master snarled, tossing the datapad he’d been presented with to the table and glaring at the hapless technician who’d given it to him. He overshot the mark and the pad slid off the table and onto the floor. The technician chased after it, and the Master, unapologetic, raised his voice to lecture his retreating back.   
  
“Its blindingly obvious that if the generator turns that slowly, the amount of heat it produces will be too low to keep the pipes from freezing in the cold season. It’s an ice-world! Either speed up the cycling rate or invent an alternative means of insulating the system. I want it within the hour!” He turned his head to address Professor Linme, who stood beside him. “I shouldn’t have to explain something so intuitive,” the Master growled, as if excusing his behavior to the worried looking man.   
  
Linme coughed. “You sometimes forget, sir, that what is  _intuitive_  to you is not necessarily—”  
  
“You needn’t flatter me,” the Master sneered, “nor am I finished. Why hasn’t your team back-engineered the Monin engine yet? I expected plans on my desk two days ago. You have had _weeks_ , now.”   
  
“The task you set is  _incredibly_  complex,” Linme said defensively, “and the deadline perhaps—no,  _certainly_  overly optimistic. I told you as much at the time.”  
  
“Nonsense. The Doctor could have done it in a day. The laboratory’s output has fallen inexcusably of late.”   
  
Linme fidgeted. “We have, admittedly, suffered as a result of,” he pursed his lips, “certain personnel losses. On that note, we seem to be stuck on the Hestin Genetic World Bank. There’s something wrong with the sorting formula, but no one can see what the problem is. I haven’t wanted to bother you about something so non-essential when you’ve seemed so occupied of late.”  
  
“If I recall correctly, the Doctor scraped together half the code you find yourself so reliant upon. He would have made notes. He usually did, albeit haphazard ones. Those might be of some use to you”   
  
“He, er,  _did,_  but I’m afraid they’re in what appears to be your language.”  
  
The Master’s eye twitched. He knew himself well enough to predict the inevitable sad trajectory of an evening’s forced reading of his former lover’s notebooks. He’d start diligently, come to sighing over the handwriting, and end up catching himself giving the books maudlin caresses, as if they were old loveletters. No, thank you all the same.  
  
“It’s not sufficiently important to devote my time to at the moment. Have you, at least made some progress on the infernal sensor ghosts and false alarms?” Sometimes whole weeks passed between the breakdown, but several had occurred today. The security claxons had had to be muted as best they could be, rather than deactivated.   
  
Linme had been dreading this question most of all.  
  
“I’m afraid none, my Lord.”   
  
“I can’t  _work_  for that noise,” the Master seethed, and true enough it distracted him beyond measure. The low, grinding rage it inspired was worse even than the noise. “The entire sabotage could only have taken the Doctor a mere day to plan and execute. How can it _possibly_  take  _this much longer_  to unravel?”   
  
Unless, as the Master worried on his more paranoid days, the Doctor had been secretly toying with the details of the plan for far longer, waiting for the last few pieces to fall into place. Had he pushed the Doctor into acting, or had the plan finally come to fruition, maturing on a timescale all its own? Had the Doctor’s plan been entirely devised those last days, or had the Doctor turned the elements of it over in his mind for months? Correlation and causation and coincidence twisted his gut.   
  
Linme finally broke. “Yes, the Doctor would have it fixed before tea time, and would have the most amusing anecdote to tell you about the whole thing. He’d know to winterize the engines without you having to say a word. He’d back-engineer the Monin ship so that his was better than the original, he’d do more than patch the code, he’d write a whole new one—of course he would, but, forgive me, my Lord,  _the Doctor isn’t here,_  and none of us are him. Nor can we fill his role, even in this admittedly slender capacity.” Linme raked a hand through his hair, which seemed thinner of late. “I know you’re frustrated, sir. I relied on him a great deal, and considered him a friend, and if you don’t mind my saying so, we’re all adrift, to degrees. But blaming my technicians is no use to anyone.”   
  
The Master had looked murderous at the beginning of this speech, but by the time Linme had finished he nodded shortly. Another man might have apologized for his behavior over the previous weeks, but the Master simply moved on to the next subject more cordially. Linme had known him long enough to properly read him. This was as both as close to self-recrimination as the Master ever publicly came and a resolution to behave differently in future.   
  
“I intend to run Palace-wide drills in the near future , which will involve your staff. I’ve been insufficiently attentive to the defense systems of late.”   
  
“Preoccupied, perhaps,” Linme offered.  
  
“Unacceptably so,” the Master agreed darkly, wincing when Dalek chatter again blared from the grills in the ceiling.   
  
“Speak of the—” Linme stopped, and swallowed, “devil,” he finished faintly, as a platoon of Daleks rolling into the laboratory, adding their shrieking to the cacophony created by the loudspeakers, and by so many heavy metal bodies rolling over the floor.   
  
“YOU ARE SURROUNDED! SURRENDER! SURRENDER!” An eyestalk swiveled, finding the Master, and the lead Dalek’s body spun around to ‘face’ him. “MASTER! YOU ARE NOW A PRISONER OF THE DALEKS!”  
  
“Am I? An atypically stylish entrance for you,” the Master quipped, letting bravado cover bewilderment and automatically feeling for the Time Ring he kept hidden in his pocket. It was hot to the touch, which meant it was being shorted by a Dalek interference field, and thus was useless to him.   
  
Linme crept back towards the bunker door, but the Master could have told him it was too late for that. He could feel his face twisting into an unattractive expression of rage and fear.  _How had they done it?_  And more importantly, what were his chances of surviving the day?  
  
*** 

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Master makes blow darts, the Doctor makes amends, and Braxiatel makes plans to take a long vacation somewhere relaxing, where no one can find him, and where public displays of affection are severely frowned upon.

The Crane Wife   
Chapter 8  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
As it happened, the Daleks didn’t execute him immediately, presumably because they hoped to force him to reveal all the Palace’s security information before he died. Linme had cuffed the Master’s hands in front of him under threat of execution, and a full Dalek squadron had escorted the Emperor to one of his own prison cells. Wryly, the Master decided to take their precautions as a true compliment to his reputation for ingenuity.  
  
The Daleks didn’t seem to have killed more than a few security troopers. He’d seen only half a dozen bodies in the uniform of his guard, and no civilian corpses choked the hallways. No doubt the Daleks wanted to capitalize on Hestin’s strong infrastructure and use it as one of their slave-labor planets, and they were preserving his people for the purpose.   
  
Arriving at the cell, the lead Dalek unceremoniously prodded the Master forwards. It used its exterminator—still hot and acrid-smelling from recent use, its threat even more blatant than usual—to jab at the Master’s spine, prodding him forward.   
  
“Gracious as ever,” the Master jeered at the Daleks’ typical recourse to force in a situation where a subtler method of persuasion would have done just as well.  
  
“YOU WILL BE SILENT!”  
  
The Master narrowed his eyes. “I suppose if I am not, you’ll exterminate me? You would already have done so if you had any such intention. You need me.”  
  
“THE DALEKS NEED NO ONE!” The lead Dalek rolled forward threateningly, invading the Master’s space. He maintained his ground.   
  
“Don’t they?” The Master fought the urge to cross his arms—he couldn’t have managed it in the cuffs, and the attempt would have looked ridiculous. “Then you’ve been ordered to spare me, for the moment. Whose instructions are you afraid to disobey? Who are you working for, Dalek?”   
  
The lead Dalek spun and departed, refusing to inadvertently reveal anything further. Silently the other Daleks glided out behind him, and the door shut. The Master was left there in the dark.   
  
The hours passed slowly. At first the Master spent them neatly arranging possible escape scenarios, and when he felt there was little else he could do, no contingency he hadn’t planned for, he left off and settled in for a good brood. There was, after all, nothing better to do, alone in the dark with only his familiar, bitter thoughts for company, for Rassilon knew how long.   
  
The Master was occasionally given to eviscerating honesty with himself. He had no idea how the Daleks had managed to invade, but he suspected that they couldn’t have done so if he had been paying his accustomed attention to his Empire. Whatever chink in his armor they’d exploited could only have existed because his attention had lapsed. If only he hadn’t wasted his energies focusing on his feckless would-be fiancé! If he survived this—and he  _would_ survive this—he would start by making the Daleks suffer for their attempt to capitalize on his moment of weakness, then take his Empire firmly in hand, and finish by making the damned Doctor pay for the indignity he’d indirectly caused.   
  
The door slid open, and the Master raised his head. While Linme had cuffed him, he’d managed to slip a bit of the thin wiring he’d been working with into the Master’s pocket—no doubt thinking the Master might be able to use it as a lock pick. Instead the Master had straightened the wire into a sort of dart, taken some poison he kept about his person for emergencies, and dipped the tip of the wire into it. While being escorted to the cell he’d carefully noted the angle at which one would have to throw a very slender projectile to penetrate a Dalek’s neck plating.   
  
The Master squinted—the light from the corridor blinding him—and threw the dart at precisely the angle required.  
  
Daleks kept the vents of their metal exoskeletons open in any breathable atmosphere, shutting them and relying on a limited supply of stored oxygen only in emergencies. Thus the dart slipped the open vent, pierced the vulnerable cranium of the Kaled lifeform within, and killed it almost instantly.   
  
Or it would have done if a Dalek had opened the door. Whatever had done so was significantly more agile, and dodged. The Master blinked in confusion when the figure in the doorway didn’t resolve into anything  _like_  a Dalek.   
  
The apparition coughed.“Was that meant for the neck vent? Very clever. I find targeting the eyestalk quite useful, but it does rather limit one’s range.”  
  
“I’m hallucinating,” the Master said automatically.  
  
“Possibly,” he agreed, coming closer—the door sliding shut behind him—and bending down to the bound man’s level, sitting on his haunches and meeting the Master’s gaze. “If you’re seeing a small pink elephant or something of that nature, then yes, I suspect you’ve been in here longer than could be considered relaxing, and could very likely benefit from a cup of tea and a change of scenery. If you think I’m  _me,_  however, I’m afraid you’re perfectly in your right mind.”  
  
The Master swallowed. “ _Doctor._ ”   
  
“Master,” the Doctor returned, expression tight and voice neutral. He patted his pockets, muttered “damn,” and then “excuse me” when he leaned forward and, inspired by the Master’s dart, snapped a bit of wire from the Master’s coat. While it was too thick for darts, it was perfect for the Doctor’s purposes. His shoulders stiffened awkwardly as he invaded the Master’s space in order to use his impromptu lock pick on the cuffs. The rings of metal encircling the Master’s wrists proved invulnerable. Instead the Doctor concentrated on snapping the connection between the chain linking the cuffs and the cuffs themselves.   
  
“These are the handcuffs the lab makes for the Guard—why did the Daleks bother attaching this flimsy coupling when they lock together without it?”   
  
“Having worn them, you know perfectly well they operate on biodata,” the Master said shortly. “Do you suppose the Daleks would be willing to slip out of their casing and stroke a tentacle across the band?”  
  
Annoyed at the waspish retort, the Doctor worked in silence. After a moment his unbound hands accomplished what the Master’s had been unable to. “There—” he began, but as soon as the right cuff’s link audibly snapped the Master surged forward, hand fisting in the Doctor’s hair. The Doctor made a short, sharp noise of alarm.  
  
“You complete bastard,” the Master hissed, pulling the Doctor’s hair hard and earning a gasp of pain. He tilted his head up and shoved the Doctor’s down, kissing him hungrily, barely noticing the sharp clack of their teeth in his desperation. He bit the Doctor’s lip, vicious, and the Doctor moaned, throwing his arms around the Master like a child seeking comfort, like a drowning man, like an exile separated from his family for decades, reunited with his wife. “You absolute idiot,” the Master whispered fiercely, kissing him again, long and hard, gasping for air and returning to the Doctor’s mouth. “You feckless, miserable betrayer,” he cursed him tenderly, drawing back with a harder look in his eye. “So why did you bother to return?” he spat.  
  
The Doctor flinched at the implication, standing up and taking a step back. “I suppose I deserve that.”  
  
“You deserve a good deal more,” the Master seethed, standing and taking a step forward, and then another, standing so close that the Doctor could feel the breath of his hissed “Well?”  
  
The Doctor pressed back towards the cell wall, swallowing. The Master watched the bob of his throat hungrily. “I,” the Doctor began, squeaking the word, then schooling himself. “The Daleks managed to get past your admittedly excellent defenses. It seems rather too clever for them, doesn’t it?”  
  
“I’d thought something very similar myself.” The Master’s eyes narrowed. “It doesn’t explain why you’ve returned.”  
  
“Well, it’s just not very likely, is it? That they could have come up with anything subtle enough to slip through your security precautions by themselves?”   
  
“The Daleks rarely take on allies,” the Master pointed out, Devil’s Advocate when the Doctor proposed an idea that had occurred to him too.  
  
“True,” the Doctor admitted. “Very true, generally. They don’t get along with anyone well enough to manage collaboration. But I stumbled upon this plot some weeks ago, and I’ve followed it to its fruition. Hampered by your bounty hunters, I should add.   
  
“You’re aware, I trust, of the degree to which the CIA resents your Empire. You’re a Time Lord, and frankly they view your independence, let alone your prosperity, as something of a personal insult. The CIA’s made the—I think frankly ludicrous—decision to assist the Daleks with this raid. In fact it was their idea, and Time Lord technology, wielded by CIA scientists, is largely responsible for the success of the push. I don’t imagine there was any way you could have prepared for such an unexpected affront.   
  
“I wanted to warn you earlier, but they would have undoubtedly intercepted any transmission I might send. So I thought I’d better drop in myself. In playing out their hand, the CIA have exposed themselves. When the spectacular failure of this coup is widely known on Gallifrey, they’ll be disgraced. I think we can safely predict a sweeping administrative overhaul, and a distinct wariness to meddle with your affairs in future.” The Doctor, obviously proud of his plan, grinned boyishly. He seemed to suppose the Master was going to offer him chummy adulations and gratitude, then send him on his merry way. The Master felt like smacking him.   
  
“That’s very public. You're giving up your cherished secret identity to them?” The Master sneered. “Impossible. No doubt you accidentally materialized in the middle of the palace, realized where you were and prepared to bolt, but heard gunfire before you could quite get away. You were then irresistibly compelled to follow the sound of chaos to its source. In your idiotic recklessness alone are you faithful and consistent. I’d believe anything of you before I accepted that you would willingly assume the responsibility you find so  _distasteful_.”  
  
“Oh really?” the Doctor snapped back. “Perhaps you should try believing in more impossible things, because I’ve done it.”   
  
The Master stared at him. Surely the Doctor hadn’t been foolish enough to expose his existence to men so patently demented they’d get in bed with the  _Daleks_  to wipe the Hestin Empire off the face of the universe. Not after centuries of avoiding their officious notice and the all-too-demonstrably real threat such attention represented.   
  
“You would have done the same to save anyone,” the Master said at last. “Simply out of your insufferable sense of moral obligation.”  
  
“Yes,” the Doctor agreed, “I would have, if it came to it. But I did it without hesitation to save you, because a cosmos without you in it is extremely unpleasant to contemplate.”   
  
The Doctor looked away, uncomfortable. “Besides, it seemed terribly churlish to leave my fiancé to languish in prison, let alone to allow him to be executed by Daleks.” He coughed. “Bad form all around.” He turned his head back towards the Master, looking up at him through his floppy fringe with a genuine hesitance. “That is—if you’ll still have me.” He looked away again. “It is, perhaps, a bit presumptuous to just— but I thought that since you were making such an effort to find me, it might be all right…”  
  
In the pause after he trailed off, in which the Master said nothing, the Doctor felt the weight of all the empty nights. The days had been quite bearable, and in the company of his companions and the tumult of the worlds they visited he could almost forget.   
  
But the nights had been a different matter. Lying in alone in bed he’d been weighed down, pressed thin with resignation. He’d remembered. A desperate, airless feeling came when he insisted to himself that this was what he wanted. All he wanted. When he told himself that things were as they always had been, that nothing had changed. And still he felt a stale determination to continue on in the deception. After all, what sin was a lie you told yourself? And for the best of reasons?  
  
The Doctor had discovered the Time Lords’ plot against the empire genuinely by accident, but he’d jumped at the pretext to rush to the Master’s aid. He’d been almost relieved, and had managed to convince himself that this was an absolutely necessary humanitarian mission: it was a bit embarrassing to be reminded, via poison dart, that the Master was perfectly capable of extricating  _himself_  from his predicament. Even with the Master so obviously furious with him, and potentially about to tell him where he could get off with this ‘fiancé’ business (and apart from the Daleks, of course), it was good to be here. The Doctor felt as though he’d stepped back onto solid ground after months lost at sea. He was happier than he had been in a very long time.   
  
The Master lifted a hand, guiding the Doctor’s chin back with two fingers, tilting it up so that he could properly look at the man he loathed and adored to the point of stupidity and had missed so, so terribly. “As I recall, your opinion on the matter was quite different when last we spoke.”  
  
“It’s—my offer isn’t unqualified. I’m sorry,” and the Doctor did look genuinely pained, “but it can’t be. If you engage in the sort of behavior that compels me to leave, then I will. I’ll have to. And it’s not that—” he swallowed, “Not that I care for you any less than you do me. Believe me, it isn’t. It’s simply what I am.”  
  
“A ‘creature of flight’?” the Master taunted bitterly.  
  
The Doctor shook his head impatiently. “You know it’s more than that. I can’t help needing to do and to care about what I do. It’s everything I am. It’s everything you see in me. You may tell yourself otherwise, when you wish things were easier for us, but you’re much too astute for that to hold for long. If I stayed when you made choices I abhor, I wouldn’t be myself anymore. As it stands I  _am_  capable of leaving, capable even of living without you—of choosing never to be quite as fulfilled as I might like to be, and of standing by that choice for the sake of what I believe in. But I’d rather not be forced to.”  
  
The Doctor took a deep breath. “I’ll never love anyone as much as I love you. Not in terms of the quantity or of quality. I never want to feel that I  _must_  leave. And if you could swear to me that you’ll do everything in your power to keep me—I would appreciate that. Please.”  
  
The Doctor rattled to a stop, and the Master stared at him, expressionless and silent. After a moment the Doctor licked his lips, unconsciously nervous.  
  
“That,” the Master began slowly, “could be arranged.”   
  
Tentative hope germinated in the Doctor’s eyes, and as the Master began to grin the Doctor grinned back, giddy.   
  
“I can’t let you go,” the Master said, pushed by the Doctor’s honesty to remind him. “To lie and say I could, if you ever wished it, would be easy, and an admirably neat ending. But you must know it would be a lie. I can respect you more than anyone else in existence, but still—and even because of that—I can’t submit peaceably to the loss of you. Though—”   
  
The Master thought of the disturbing snippet he’d heard of the conversation of that bounty hunter, Smatters—thought of how unnerved and furious he’d been by the feeling of association with this disgusting man and his desires.  
  
“The night I pressed you to be with me—that was… wrong. But in trying to keep you, I can’t promise never to over-step boundaries that my regard for you might otherwise compel me to observe.”   
  
The Doctor smiled thinly, leaning forward to lay a kiss on the Master’s forehead. “And  _that_  is what  _you_  are.”   
  
“A peasant stealing your cloak and confining you against your will for the rest of your life?”   
  
The Doctor’s lip quirked, and he took the Master’s hand in his. “Hardly a peasant. You’re too much of a snob. Though as you  _did_  steal my TARDIS, you can’t deny accusations of thievery.”  
  
“I suppose you’ve never resorted to extraordinary measures to get what you want?” The Master raised an eyebrow.  
  
“Lying about the location of my TARDIS hardly compares to a bit of youthful scrumping,” the Doctor said primly. He slid from the Master’s finger a still useless Time Ring. The Master watched the Doctor take a deep breath that he didn’t seem to realize he was taking, and push the ring down his own appropriate finger.  
  
“There,” he breathed. “Exchanging rings is a sort of human custom. It means—”  
  
“I know what it means,” the Master said shortly. As if he wouldn’t have done his research.   
  
The Master considered the Doctor’s hand. A Time Ring was a risky trinket to give someone with a proven penchant for escape. And yet what could he really do to keep the Doctor against his will—put sticky tape on all the windows? He preferred the company of a husband to that of a prisoner. The Doctor might run, might  _always_  run. But if it came to it, the Master intended always to catch him.   
  
  
***  
  
The Doctor swung into the room with a mad grin. “Hello everyone!” and, unable to resist, “I’m the Doctor, I’m here to rescue you.”  
  
He was surprised when, instead of relieved cheers, that was met with a group groan.  
  
“Where have  _you_  been?” Technician Bea, a frizzy haired woman near the front, groused.  
  
“I had a bet you’d be here an hour ago,” a reedy young physicist with the deeply unfortunate name of Skip Roshobobo whined. “You lost me 20 credits!”   
  
The Doctor felt put-out by the seeming mass desertion of his former co-workers. “Everyone seems to be attaching a monetary value to my presence,” the Doctor shoved his hands behind his back. “It’s very disquieting. Like working for a wage.”   
  
While he couldn’t be seen, the Doctor fiddled with the Time Ring. Like most Time Lord traveling devices, it had a chameleon circuit. The Doctor clicked through the rings’ settings until the device felt smoother under his fingers. When he moved his hands forward to release the lab technicians’ handcuffs, the light from the door caught the simple gold band on his hand.  
  
“Is that what it looks like?” Professor Linme croaked from the back.  
  
“What’s that, Linme?” the Doctor asked with maddening cheer, getting to his knees and setting about breaking the links on everyone’s wrist-cuffs.   
  
“Are you engaged?” Assistant Stassi demanded.  
  
The Doctor glanced down at his hand, doing a theatrical double take. “Oh! I suppose I am!”  
  
“If it’s not to the Master, do you mind leaving us here?” Technician Bea asked tentatively. “I mean thanks all the same, but I think I’d rather be in a secure concrete cell when he finds out.”  
  
“Agreed,” Linme put in wearily.   
  
The Doctor laughed. “As it happens, he already knows.”  
  
“And the building’s still standing,” Professor Linme mused as the Doctor attended to him. “Well then, I suppose congratulations are in order. Are you back, then?”  
  
“You know, I rather think I am.” The Doctor stood. “And Linme—thank you. Now come on, stand up, stretch your legs—the Master’s going to need our help in the control room. We’ve managed to use the Draconian wall shields to clear the Palace’s core—now he’s patching into the Daleks’ own equipment to broadcast the signal I devised to draw the rest of the Dalek fleet in orbit above the planet into the CIA singularity prison I, er,  _borrowed_.   
  
“It’s the most difficult element of the plan, and he’ll need full concentration and every ounce of his system-coding expertise. He mustn’t be distracted or threatened - my companions are seeing to that, but they can only monitor the control room—I need all of you to help me operate the wall shields, so that when he sends the signal we’re not overrun by whatever furious remnants of the Dalek fleet still remain on the ground.”   
  
“Oh, is  _that_  all you need.” Technician Bea rolled her eyes, but brushed at her coat in a workmanlike manner that indicated assent.   
  
“It  _is_  a good plan,” Skip admitted slowly. “A great plan, really.”   
  
“And it’s good to have you back,” Linme said with real warmth. “Even if you are—and I say this in the kindest sense—a complete arse.”  
  
“It’s good to  _be_  back,” the Doctor admitted, “and I’m choosing to ignore that last bit. Now everyone, follow me!”  
  
  
***  
  
“Of course you’ll have to be polite to Braxiatel for the entire day,” the Doctor pointed out, re-entering the console room of his TARDIS.   
  
The Master trailed after him, rolling his eyes. “On second thought, there’s still more than enough time to elope to the Oodsphere—they’ll sing of the DoctorMaster and all that nonsense if given the slightest provocation. Tourists often find themselves getting married there entirely by accident.”  
  
“Certainly we can dispense with ceremony,” the Doctor reached the console, grinning to himself. “Though Gretna Green is more traditional. You will, of course, explain the whole thing to my mother. Why her invitation got lost in the vortex?”   
  
“I’ve never seen you in such a good mood!” Tegan commented from the couch. Nominally left under Nyssa’s direction, Tegan had actually been sitting here munching the last of the malt loaf sullenly and occasionally making sour comments about the Doctor always leaving her behind whenever anything interesting happened. “It must’ve gone  _really_  well, for you not to be _sighing._ ”   
  
The Doctor glared at her over the half-moon spectacles he’d put on to examine some of the smaller readouts in the Control Room. “Oh Tegan, really—”  
  
“And then there’s the part where we say, ‘Doctor, what’s wrong?’”  
  
“ _Tegan._ ” The Doctor, aware of the Master’s smirk, flushed slightly.  
  
“And then  _you_  say, ‘Hm? Oh nothing,  _nothing,’_  and sulk off to your rooms. You’ve gotten a lot worse recently. And now you’ve cheered right up! Are these Dalek things like Easter Eggs—crack ‘em open and there’s a candy surprise? Only yours was full of Valium?”  
  
“ _Tegan,_ ” Nyssa reprimanded from the console, next to the Doctor. “You’re only cross because the Doctor wouldn’t take your advice and stay inside the TARDIS,  _or_  let you come. Hello, Master.”  
  
“Nyssa,” he greeted with a smile. “Your father was quite well when last we spoke, as was your charming step-mother.”   
  
“The Master!” Tegan blurted. “This is that Master chap who’s been hounding us across the universe!”  
  
“I’m afraid so.  _Very_  impolite of you, I might add—I’m not allowed back at Milliiways, you know.” The Doctor shook his head, still adjusting dials, and running around the console, physically scooting Nyssa out of the way and ducking down to get at a panel underneath her.   
  
“I imagine you will be, as my Emperor,” the Master chuckled.   
  
Tegan, listening to this exchange, suddenly spotted the bright gold band on the Doctor’s hand, which was curled up over the rim of the console for support as he worked.   
  
“Doctor!” she gasped.  
  
“Hm?” The Doctor looked over at her, then followed her eye-line to his finger. “Oh yes! That.”  
  
Nyssa looked between them, confused. “It’s just a piece of jewelry. Somewhat out of character, perhaps, but surely not so remarkable?”  
  
“Well,” the Doctor coughed, getting back to work uncoupling his TARDIS from the Hestin Palace’s security net, “your people choose to represent these things differently, Nyssa. Different cultures, different customs.”  
  
The Master casually wrapped his hand around the Doctor’s where he clutched the console, and the Doctor absently brushed his thumb over the Master’s knuckles, not looking up from his work.  
  
“Oh,” Nyssa murmured, surprised.  
  
“ ‘Oh’ indeed,” Tegan snorted. “This man’s hunted us like rats—you don’t mean to tell be it’s because you ran out on him? Not after all that rot about how ‘it’s complicated!’”  
  
“There was rather more to it than that,” the Doctor insisted.  
  
“That is exactly what happened,” the Master informed her smugly  
  
“Well, all I can say is, it’s a good job you dropped Turlough off with his people before we came here.”  
  
“Why—ouch!” The Doctor burned his finger on an exposed circuit. He looked up to the Master and, receiving an entirely satisfactory ‘poor baby’ expression, went back to work. “Why is that, Tegan?”   
  
“He’d have been crushed, is all.”  
  
The Doctor poked his head up, frowning. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”  
  
“Oh come on, Doctor, he was a bloody nong about you, don’t tell me you didn’t know.”   
  
“Nong,” the Doctor repeated, uncomprehending.  _“Nong?”_    
  
“He was infatuated with you,” the Master cut in, shortly.  
  
“Yer, that,” Tegan nodded.  
  
“What? Oh he was  _not_ —and I notice you haven’t asked who we’re talking about,” the Doctor pointed out, giving the Master a mildly accusing look.   
  
“Naturally I have no need to ask,” the Master gave a Gallic shrug. “And that’s reminded me, I have certain  _words_  to say to Bernice.”   
  
“I don’t think that’s necessary. She was actually quite a staunch advocate on your behalf,” the Doctor countered.   
  
“Did she need to be?” the Master raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware that I needed a defender.”  
  
“Well,” the Doctor grinned, “She found me a very receptive audience. I admit I was quite willing to be brought around.”   
  
“Were you?” the Master smirked, leaning on the console. “What particular points did you find most convincing?”   
  
“Oh now  _that_  would be telling—”   
  
Tegan began to grasp that the future would be one long meeting of their highly exclusive mutual admiration society. There would be whole days when she’d be lucky to get a word in edgeways. She felt it important to settle certain points before the banter really got going.   
  
“So what’s gonna happen to us if you get hitched?” Tegan asked. “You are getting hitched, right? I suppose if you can travel in time then you can get gay married in space, if it suits you. Not that I have any problem with that!” She waved her hands in hasty response to the Doctor’s glare over his spectacles. “You do what you like, I’m happy for you, really, I am! I mean I vote Labor and everything!”  
  
“Yes, thank you, Tegan,” the Doctor said dryly, standing and leaning back against the console. “And if you and Nyssa wish to return to your respective homes, you are, of course, free to do so. If,” he shoved his hands in his coat pockets, “you want to stay on, however, then you, Nyssa, could do a lot worse then to spend some time working in the labs on Hestin, as a sort of intern under Professor Linme.”  
  
“I think I’d like that,” Nyssa said, “if it’s all right with the Master. Hestin Prime is a beautiful city, and I’m very familiar with the Palace. The laboratory’s among the most prestigious in the galaxy!”  
  
“Justly so,” the Master glanced over her head briefly, “with the Doctor at its head. He’s a formidable scientist.”  
  
Tegan rolled her eyes at the way the Doctor actually looked  _coy_  at the praise. “What am I supposed to do, then?” she grumbled. “Pack off back to being an air stewardess?”  
  
“Not if you don’t want to,” the Doctor corrected, firmly. “You’re very young, quite organized, and you have a great deal of energy. You could be very happy in the Civilian Volunteer Corps.”  
  
“The Civilian Volunteer Corps?” the Master repeated with a raised eyebrow.  
  
“Yes, I thought of it while I was away and couldn’t tell you—that happened rather a lot actually, very inconvenient—I’ll tell you all about it later. On the worlds you control that have strong military traditions, you’ve retained their existing mandatory conscription requirements? I think you could benefit from having a civil service option as well, like the Works Progress Administration or the Sherut Leumi on Earth. ” He patted the Master on the shoulder. “But for the moment—” the Doctor spun back around to address Tegan, shoving his hands in his back pockets, “I still intend to travel. I’ll simply split my life between living here and traveling  _with_ the Master. The Empire need never even know we were gone, if we’re traveling with each other in temporal synchronicity. Which should be straightforward, we’ll only have to reverse my, er, _current_  modifications and let the TARDIS’s Rassilon Imperature steer us clear of the Empire’s sphere of influence, rather than keeping us within it.”   
  
The Doctor seemed to suddenly realize this plan would mean sweeping changes in his now-fiancé’s life. He glanced at the Master and then back at the girls. “Take your time, Nyssa, Tegan. Think about what you want. I should see how the lab staff are getting on—” he coughed. “Master, why don’t you help me with that? It should only take us a couple of hours to get the clean-up process thoroughly in motion, then the Master and I will return, and we can all talk about it.”   
  
Tegan rolled her eyes even harder at the Doctor’s obviousness, but had tact enough not to call him on it. The Doctor offered the Master his arm and a coaxing look, and then let himself be swept out the TARDIS door and down the hall towards the Master’s private rooms. After a moment’s awkward silence, the Doctor began slowly, choosing his words as carefully now as he’d been careless before.   
  
“That is, of course, if you’d  _like_  to travel with me. It’s a lot to ask, I know. But I think you could come to enjoy  _seeing_  the whole of time and space in addition to ruling a bit of it. We wouldn’t have to be apart, or to give up our lives. And it’d be wonderful, I think, to have you there with me. More than that—it would be my honor.”   
  
At the doorway to their bedroom, the Master smiled to himself as the Doctor touched the pads of his fingers to the biolock. The unchanged locks yielded at his touch.   
  
“You mean to tell me I would have to trail after you telling you how brilliant you are, risk danger for people I care nothing for, and generally participate in the hobbyist adventuring you squander your talents on?” He began to unbutton his jacket.  
  
“Master, it won’t be as intolerable as all that.” The Doctor grinned cheekily, stopping the Master and taking his hands in his own, so that he could claim to task for himself. “You could try saving a few planets yourself.” He leaned forward and kissed the Master. “I might feel an _uncontrollable,_ ” he unbuttoned a few more of the Master’s jacket’s buttons, and trailed kisses across his chin, along the top of his beard, “ _surge_  of gratitude.”  
  
“After almost a year of enforced chastity, you had  _better_ ,” the Master growled, curling his fingers hard around the Doctor’s shoulders.   
  
“Don’t exaggerate,” the Doctor tsked, “you know perfectly well it was five months and fourteen days.” He took the Master’s head in his hands, his fingers twining in and mussing his hair. In his absence the Master had gone back to wearing it the (far less flattering) way he didn’t like it, but his ministrations soon had it set to rights. He smiled at the Master’s stubbornness, and kissed him soundly.   
  
“ _God_ , I missed you every one of them.” The Doctor drew back so he could slide off the Master’s jacket, and when he’d managed it he curled his fingers around the Master’s shirt-sleeved arms, as if reassuring himself of the Master’s solidity. He kissed the Master still harder, his fingers working deft and fast over buttons, pushing the shirt open with gathering haste as the Master stroked his hands down the Doctor’s back, one resting over the small of it, the other drifting down, clutching his arse. One of the buttons popped off, rolling under the bureau. The Doctor pulled back and met the Master’s gaze. His face was flushed, he was breathing harder now. “I missed you  _so_.”  
  
“Did it hurt, my dear?” the Master asked silkily, pushing the Doctor’s jacket off with a calculated carelessness, with an agonizing slowness, with hearts beating frantically at the Doctor’s nearness.  
  
The Doctor nodded, lips tight, his expression eloquently outlining a satisfying misery.  
  
 _“Good,”_  the Master answered.  
  
He was surprised when the Doctor frowned and shoved him down to the bed. He scrambled up to sit back against the head board, and gasped when the Doctor gave his neck a long lick, then sucked it hard enough to leave a mark, placed high enough to be partly glimpsed over the edge of his collar. His fingers, meanwhile, fumbled the clasp of the Master’s trousers. He plucked at the fabric feverishly, trying to work it down blindly while busy licking him.   
  
“I’m still wearing the handcuffs,” the Master reminded him as the Doctor finished pulling his shirt off over the obstructions.   
  
“Mm. Yes, I’d noticed,” the Doctor arched an eyebrow. “And very fetching they are, too.” He reached up to stroke the Master’s hair again, snuck his hand down the Master’s back. While distracting him with kisses, the Doctor pressed the priming mechanism on the cuffs, imprinting his biodata. They snapped together sharply, and the Master broke off to look at him.  
  
“Why Doctor,” he murmured, “how very interesting.”  
  
“I certainly think so.” The Doctor leaned back with a positively wicked look. He finished undressing, his trainers banging softly on the floor as he dropped them off without looking where they landed. “I want you,” he breathed.  
  
“So I gathered,” the Master said softly. “You’re not normally so blatant in your desire. Unless, of course, you’ve been educated differently since last we—”  
  
The Doctor laughed, swinging a leg over him and stranding him, bending down so that the breath from his whisper landed on the Master’s lips. “There hasn’t been anyone else.” He shook his head. “Idiot,” he said affectionately. “How could there be? You’re not exactly easy to get over, you know. And as for before, I was never really sure what I wanted then. I thought it was my TARDIS—my freedom. And it is, it certainly is—but it’s not the only thing I need to be happy. I had to go traveling again to see that.” His face and voice were soft with fondness. “If I haven’t said it yet, I do adore you, you know.”   
  
The Master, smirking, gave a pointed glance at the Doctor’s heavy erection, which pressed into his thigh. “Oh, believe me, Doctor, I feel that you do.”  
  
“Ah, another moment murdered,” the Doctor teased. He ran his hand up the Master’s bare chest, up his neck, feathering his fingertips over the Master’s lips. The Master obediently lapped at them with his tongue, and the Doctor shivered when the Master drew two fingers into his mouth and sucked them, staring up at the Doctor in blatant invitation.   
  
“That’s it,” the Doctor murmured, digging through the bedside table with his free hand. In search of lube, he pulled out a pen, which he threw in the general direction of the bathroom, a TCE which went the same way, and a backup copy the Master had made of the Doctor’s former cuffs and collar, in expectation of his recapture. The Doctor pulled drew out these last with a speculative air.   
  
The Master’s eyes widened. The last thing he wanted was for the Doctor to be reminded of past unpleasantness, which might spoil their so far entirely satisfying reunion. He shook the Doctor’s fingers out of his mouth—some groveling might well be in order.  
  
“We’ll throw them out, if you think it advisable. We could reduce them to ashes! Melt them down to make a wedding ring. Anything you choose, my dear.”   
  
“Actually I  _was_  thinking we could use them on occasion. Privately, of course. As for the matter of a ring, I seem to remember you having seventy five drachbars in your possession—ah yes!” He discovered the bag in the drawer, held it up, jangled it, and set it back. “Here they are. These should do nicely—enough for a relatively small wagon, or a relatively large ring, I believe you’ll find.” He grinned at the Master. “Appropriate, I think.”  
  
“I’m afraid you lost me at ‘we could use them for sex on occasion,” the Master managed, hard at even the suggestion of the Doctor so willingly demonstrating that he belonged to him, unbelievably aroused by the element of being claimed that was now apparent in his own position.   
  
The Doctor smiled fondly. “I didn’t actually say ‘for sex,’ you know. Admittedly I did heavily imply it—ah  _ha!_ ” His fumbling finally produced the lubricant, which he unscrewed. He slipped back off the Master and knelt between his legs, running his hands down the Master’s thighs before running an oil-slick finger around and then into him.  
  
The Master squirmed slightly, smirking when he caught the Doctor visibly swallowing. Slowly, with exquisite care, the Doctor slipped another finger in, past the knuckle. He pumped them in and out of the Master so slowly he might well have been unaffected by desire, except that his eyes were black and wide, and his arms trembling visibly, his fingers shuddering softly inside the Master.   
  
“Come now,” the Master coaxed, letting his voice roll and a bit of hypnotic pressure sink into it. “Do you want to fuck me or not?”   
  
At that comment the Doctor pressed a third finger in, fucking the Master a little faster on them now.   
  
“That’s better. Yet still so delicate,” the Master commented, amused, stretching his bound hands, enjoying the way the slight discomfort contrasted with the slick pleasure of the Doctor’s fingers working inside him. “The way you open me up for yourself, as if every time is the first. As though you haven’t had me in this bed a hundred times. So  _careful_.” So selective, he did not say, about the ways in which you’re willing to hurt me. Recriminations could only be worked through in time, only slowly. Both he and the Doctor had given each other everything they could now, and the Master had the greatest faith that they would endure the aftershocks of their initial rift.   
  
The Master slid down the bed obligingly after the Doctor when he pulled away in search of a more convenient position. With a hand on the Master’s shoulder, steadying both the Master and himself, the Doctor guided himself in, giving a low, fluttering ‘oh’ as he found his cock gripped tight by warm flesh. The Master arrayed his mind in an invitingly open configuration, and the Doctor obligingly slipped in, bucking his hips involuntarily when the Master squeezed him, physically and mentally.  
  
“Now that’s not fair,” the Doctor protested, giving a sharp, deep thrust, almost as punishment.   
  
“If you intend to keep doing that whenever I do something that displeases you, being good is going to be much more difficult than I thought.” The Master pushed his bound hands up to the Doctor’s face, indicating that he wanted the use of them. The Doctor made a show of considering the question, then gave the metal a delicate lick. The Master’s wrists sprang free. He dug his nails into the Doctor’s hips, clutching him desperately, as if he might disappear, and with a sharp gasp of pain and surprise the Doctor pushed in again, establishing a rhythm with slow, hard, deep strokes that made the Master’s hands slip down his sides and fist in the bedclothes.   
  
The Master pressed his hips into the Doctor’s, desperate for the remorselessly even fuck to go _faster_ , to bring him off rather than torture him exquisitely, and (he thought as the Doctor shoved him down into his thrusts with the hands gripping his shoulders) seemingly endlessly.   
  
The Doctor was sure and confident in his rhythm, determined to set his pace, and tender—but the Master saw his opening in the way the Doctor bit his lip hard, as he did when he was holding himself back from taking what he wanted too roughly. The Master exploited that fraying control, kneading the Doctor’s mind with the self-gratifying delight of a cat with a ball of string, smirking harder every time he earned a stifled sound.   
  
He worked until the Doctor seemed gorgeously lost above him—intent and adoring and helplessly in thrall to what the Master was giving him. The Master wondered if he looked so overcome in the Doctor’s place, and with that curious impulse he swum deeper into the Doctor’s mind to find flatteringly well-handled memories of himself in the reverse position, as seen from the Doctor’s perspective. He took the remembered sensations of those nights (and, to be honest, those mornings, middays, afternoons and evenings) and pressed them into every free pathway of the Doctor’s neural circuit board, making the Doctor moan (a dizzy little sound) and then almost sob as he felt himself being taken even as he took.  
  
“ _Fuck_ ,” he whispered, and the Master shivered. His Doctor so rarely used profanity that the loss of control was exquisitely erotic.   
  
The Doctor’s rhythm sped up, got deliciously sloppy. The Master rocked his hips greedily to meet the Doctor’s thrusts, and sucked the Doctor’s mind into his own desperately. The Doctor was so dazed he didn’t seem to seem to register anything but the Master, and the Master loved it, demanded more.  
  
“Faster,” he commended, delighted. “Harder, come on,  _harder_.”  
  
“I’ll hurt you—” the Doctor gasped. “I don’t want to—”  
  
“ _Hurt me,_ ” the Master clawed his fingers into the Doctor’s back. “Fuck me like you want to own me. Like you  _do_  own me. As though I was made for your particular use.”   
  
“God,  _Master_ —”  
  
He moaned when the Doctor slammed into him, whispering his name. “Again, say—do that again.”  
  
“Master,” the Doctor said louder, pounding into him even more furiously now. The Master found the familiar, dusty strings of his mind, brushed off the evidence of disuse, and pulled so hard the Doctor gulped. “Master, stop, stop, it’s too—”  
  
The Master did, just long enough to let the Doctor breathe again. After a moment’s pause, he rocked his hips. Then, very slowly indeed, he pulled the cords again, building the pressure at a less frantic level.  
  
“Oh, that’s  _not_  stopping, is it,” the Doctor gasped, half laughing.  
  
“Of course it isn’t,” the Master agreed.  
  
“Mm. Can anyone play?” The Doctor fondled the draping folds of the Master’s consciousness, then grasped them and drew them all to himself in one long pull.  
  
“Please,” the Master gasped, “do.”  
  
The Doctor pushed into him, taking over from the Master the task of steadily building them back to his earlier furious pace. In every downbeat, every time he pulled back, he twisted and tugged at the Master’s mind, dragging long fingers through it. The intensity was unabating, the stimulation constant, building ever higher.   
  
The Master’s breath grew shallow. He lost his concentration, letting the Doctor’s mind slip through his fingers without noticing. His mouth hung open, his head dropped back, and he shook under the onslaught. Not normally given to demonstrative verbal appreciation, he choked the Doctor’s name into a long moan.   
  
It took only the slightest push for the Doctor to topple him over the edge, and to catch him on the other side. After a moment’s respite, the Doctor pressed on, fucking him still. The Master couldn’t stifle the whimper that slipped out of his mouth. The aftershocks seemed as though they’d rip him apart. He knew it wasn’t true, but it  _felt_  as though he’d die from much more of this.  
  
“Shh,” the Doctor soothed, “I’ve got you.”   
  
After a few more thrusts he spilled in the Master with a low groan. He collapsed on top of him, falling on his arms and then onto the Master’s chest, breathing hard.  
  
“Quite Masterly,” he preened. “If I do say so myself.”  
  
The Master chuckled weakly when he got his breath back.   
  
The Doctor laid his cheek alongside the Master’s. “I’ve needed this.” He considered for a moment. “Needed you.”  
  
“Naturally you did. Tremas said you were a twitching sour-faced wreck, desperately in need of his Master to steady him. He put strong emphasis on how you seemed, in his opinion, to be crying out for a good fuck.”  
  
The Doctor laughed. “I’m certain that’s precisely the language he used, as well.”  
  
“Oh, indeed,” the Master ran his thumb along the Doctor’s spine, accepting the weight of him gratefully. “He could see these were circumstances that called for strong words and strong action.”  
  
“I see,” the Doctor said dryly. “So citing the authority of a venerable old statesman is your  _best_ means of angling to get me on my hands and knees, is it? Frankly, I’m not impressed.”  
  
“I’ll show you impressive when I can move again,” the Master grunted.  
  
“Mm. No, I think I rather like you like this.” The Doctor shifted.  _Pointedly_.  
  
The Master looked up at him, alarmed. “My dear Doctor, you can’t be serious.” If the Doctor tried  _that_  again any time in the next quarter of an hour, the Master was dismally certain he’d lose consciousness.   
  
The Doctor pouted. Squirmed. “Just a  _little_? I could go quite slowly… I’ve missed you  _terribly_ , you see—”  
  
“Fifteen minutes!” the Master pleaded.  
  
“Oh very well,” the Doctor huffed, flicking the Master’s arm with his thumb and forefinger. “Some wanton sex slave  _you_  are. You’re lucky I love you, or I wouldn’t put up with it.”  
  
“Mm,” the Master transitioned from embarrassed to smug with the instantaneous ease of a good engine going from zero to sixty in under a second. “I did try and tell you that you did.”   
  
“Yes, yes,” the Doctor rolled his eyes. “You were right. Again. Somewhere they’re engraving the trophy cup even now.”   
  
“Oh, now  _that_ ,” the Master grinned, “would be an entirely appropriate wedding present.”   
  
  
***  
  
  
Epilogue  
  
  
Smatters and Greig were drinking in reasonably priced locales these days. Having failed to collect the astronomical bounty on the man Smatters referred to as ‘the boy-fiend,’ they’d taken on various smaller jobs in the intervening months. Recently though, business in this part of the galaxy seemed to have dried up entirely. All they’d had this week was the Duchess of Mi-ki’s escaped ultra-panda, but it turned out the thing had only run off because it had gotten knocked up, and wanted to find a den to deliver in.  
  
Smatters had wanted to sell the things on the black market on a planet where importation laws made the critters difficult to get, and thus desirable and expensive, but Greig had been firm on taking them back to the Duchess at no extra charge. She’d been delighted and had sent them off with hampers of sweets from her kitchens in addition to the (small) reward, as a special thanks, but Smatters grumbled they could have bought all the sweets they’d ever need with the takings from selling five wee, trainable ultra-pandas to the bear-baiters of Raxicorophalapatorius.   
  
Greig could have pointed out to him that the Duchess was a fixture of the inter-planetary social season, a cheery eccentric who liked to bring her beloved ultra-panda with her to parties. When she showed up with five unbearably adorable babies as well, and told the assembled rich guests how the heroic Smatters and Greig had rescued their mother within mere days, and had even brought her back these darlings, her listeners would think of the same apparently very reliable, almost  _respectable_  firm for their own business. He and Smatters might well go straight, like many a firm before them, and enter a much more safe and lucrative world of private commissions.   
  
They were at in bar on a suburban planet in the Hestin Protective Space—outside the Empire, but still broadly considered an Imperial concern. The waitress, who seemed bored but not cheerless, brought Smatters his ridiculously suave Trakenite Daiquiri, which tasted terrible but which he was convinced was so mysterious looking it would one day prompt an inquiry into its nature from a passing attractive creature. She likewise deposited Greig’s practical lager on the table. As she walked away she felt Smatter’s eyes resting on her bum, and she calmly drew her arm back and held the menu she was carrying over it as she walked over to the door.   
  
Smatters, embarrassed to be caught out, muttered ‘probably frigid anyway’ into his daiquiri.   
  
The waitress stood at the door, keeping an eye out for customers and chatting idly to the barman. Looking outside, she started.   
  
“No way!”  
  
“Hm?” the barman looked up. “Lemme guess—boss wearing that terrible hat you told him you’d burn if he brought in again?”  
  
“No, and I’d smack him if he tried,” the waitress responded promptly. “Green skin and a mauve hat? Madness. And if I’m right, you’ll  _never_  guess. I think that’s the Emperor of Hestin!” She pointed to a man who’d stepped out of a blue box some moments ago, and was apparently still speaking to someone inside.   
  
Suddenly she was joined at the window by an anxious Smatters. “Which?”  
  
She had better eyesight than he did, and squinted out door’s glass a moment. “Um, the—oh! Both of them!” A second figure had stepped out of the TARDIS, and they were making their way towards the bar’s door.  
  
“Right! Our cue to leave!” Smatters had no wish to encounter the Master again. Even if he had been successful in winning back his paramour, and therefore might have calmed down since their last encounter. Smatters' memory of gloved hands choking the life out of him was too vivid for their meeting to be pleasant from him. He turned around. “Grieg, let’s vamoose!”   
  
But their table was empty—Greig has already left. Only a twenty to cover the bill remained. Smatters cursed, running out the back door after him, muttering about worthless partners who didn’t even have the common courtesy to tell you when they were quitting the establishment.  
  
As the back door banged behind Smatters, the Doctor came in through the front, holding if for his husband and glancing around the room.  
  
“No sign of Brax,” the Doctor announced, a trifle smug. “We must have beaten him here.”  
  
The Master stepped in after him. “I expect he’ll materialize in an hour, hoping to only be kept waiting by you for another forty five minutes or so. Tell me Doctor, how does it feel to be on time for a meeting? You must find the sensation wholly novel.”   
  
The Doctor glared at him and slumped into a booth, arranging his long limbs awkwardly.   
  
Chuckling, the Master sat down on the same side. “I’m joking. Braxiatel knows me to be reasonably punctual. He’ll probably arrive shortly. Don’t pout.”  
  
“I am  _not_ —” the Doctor began. He looked up when the door chime rang again, and Tegan entered the bar, spotted them, and walked over.   
  
“Hey Doctor. Why the sour face?”  
  
The Doctor smoldered, and the Master laughed outright.  
  
“What did I say?” Tegan looked between them, bemused.  
  
“Nothing, my dear Miss Jovanka,” the Master grinned at the Doctor. “His highness is simply delighted at the prospect of spending the afternoon hashing out policy agreements with his brother. It should take some considerable time—there are so many procedural guidelines to consider, so many important Time Lords’ opinions to weigh, and a great many arrangements to be made. Perhaps we’ll even find time to touch on trading terms!”  
  
“Don’t ‘his highness’ me, Master, and Tegan, you’re supposed to be in the capitol making the arrangements for your Planetary Services aid trip. You can’t have finished yet.” The Doctor spoke shortly, the phrase ‘trading terms’ having shaken his equanimity considerably.   
  
“I have, actually,” Tegan said serenely, waiving the waitress over and turning back to them. “My counterpart here’s very organized—we’ve been corresponding for weeks now, so there wasn’t that much to go over. I just shook her hand and had a look at the accommodations, then I hitched a shuttle-ride, and here I am!”  
  
“Then why did you come? Ah, lemonade, please—” the Doctor addressed the waitress, who had just arrived, and who was doing a very good job of not looking too star-struck, “and he’ll have an Ood Smear—with one of those curly straws, if you have them, but if not, any two cocktail straws will suffice. And with olive juice, but no olives. He hates olives. Oh, and stirred—not shaken. Thank you so much.”   
  
The Master smiled charmingly when the waitress looked up from her frantic notes, and she blushed, forgiving him for being a spectacularly picky customer.  
  
“I’ll have a Bloody Mary, if you’ve got them,” Tegan said to the waitress, who then departed, and turned back to the Doctor. “I see you’ve met Sally then,” she snickered.  
  
“What?” the Master asked.  
  
“Oh shush,” the Doctor huffed, visibly embarrassed at the extent to which he’d been domesticated. “How have you even seen that? It didn’t come out until 1989.”  
  
“Nyssa and I did an Eighties Films night—I don’t think she got much out of the Brat Pack. Anyway, as if I’d miss an excuse to meet your brother! I told Nyssa I’d be back with details.”  
  
“Fabulous,” the Doctor sighed, rubbing his face with his hands. “Take a picture, why don’t you? It’s only a secret government conference between a renegade empire and the Time Lords of Gallifrey, held in neutral territory. Go right ahead!”  
  
Silently, Tegan took her hand out of the pocket containing her camera.   
  
Behind her, someone cleared his throat. “John.”  
  
The Doctor looked up and glared. “ _Irving_.”  
  
The Master glanced at Tegan. “Would you excuse us, my dear?”  
  
“Sure,” Tegan said, wandering off, but what she meant was ‘I will move to a table with an excellent vantage point and great acoustics, because no way am I missing the rest of a conversation that begins with the Doctor getting called ‘John.’’  
  
Braxiatel took the seat opposite the couple, having somehow already acquired a magenta, mojito-like drink.   
  
“Who’s in charge of the CIA this week?” the Master asked by way of a casual opening remark. “Anyone interesting?”  
  
“To my knowledge no one’s ever referred to Co-Ordinator Narvin as ‘interesting,’” Braxiatel said as the Master and the Doctor’s drinks arrived.   
  
“ _Narvin_? Are we scraping the barrel to that extent?” the Master clucked his tongue disapprovingly.   
  
“I’m afraid so. Both co-ordinator Vansell and Inquisitor Darkel have fallen out of public favor, more due to highly-visible failure of the Hestin Invasion than the idea of the Invasion itself. But, of course, you’re not without a family and a certain influence—House Oakden has been clamoring for Borusa’s resignation.”  
  
The Master raised an eyebrow. “ No doubt they hope to appropriate the current indignation to secure the presidency for one of their own.” He stroked the Doctor’s thigh with his hand under the table, lazily.  
  
Braxiatel dismissed the obvious with a hand wave. “Of course Borusa’s weak, after the Sontaaran fiasco. He’ll fall, but Oakden hasn’t a strong enough contender to take his place.”  
  
The Doctor had been nursing his lemonade and wishing they would stop talking about people he’d never heard of, but here he brightened up. This bit he knew. “Your hour, I suppose?”  
  
Braxiatel smiled thinly into his mojito. “One hopes,” he murmured.   
  
“Ridiculous false modesty,” the Master rolled his eyes. “You know the presidency is yours, otherwise we wouldn’t be making this visit on Imperial time.”  
  
“Imperial time—what an interesting phrase. Two emperors who spend half their lives traveling outside the reach of their Empires' sphere of influence, and manage their Empire the rest of the time—what seems like  _all_  the time, to anyone within that Empire. Ingenious. Tell me, how is my scheme working out for you?”  
  
“Excellent, thank you,” the Doctor smiled, not minding the implied insult as he normally would have.  
  
Braxiatel frowned—normally the Doctor was easy to needle and amusing to tease. In this, his hour of triumph, when the Presidency was within reach and he should by all rights have been on top of the universe, it disconcerted Braxiatel that his little brother obviously didn’t envy him a jot. Seeing that the Doctor considered himself somehow  _above_  the whole thing cheapened Brax’s victory. There was something almost like indulgence in the Doctor’s expression.  
  
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you seem disgustingly happy,” Braxiatel remarked, narrowing his eyes.  
  
“Well,” the Doctor shrugged, “perhaps I am.” Under the table, the Doctor took the Master’s hand in his, rolling the pad of his thumb over the knuckles.  
  
“Whereas, regardless of whether you mind my saying so, you, Braxiatel, seem on edge,” the Master said with an obscenely pleased grin. “I think your mood would improve a great deal if you simply followed your brother’s example. Brax, thou art sad; get thee a wife! Or a husband. Whichever is nearer to hand.”   
  
Braxiatel rolled his eyes at the way his brother seemed to melt a bit at the Shakespere quote. The Master had always been cheap.   
  
“Sadly Master, you’ve already been ensnared by my brother. Where else am I to find such a happy match?” Braxiatel’s dead-pan tone made the Doctor laugh, but he coughed, recovering himself.  
  
“What about that young woman you brought to our wedding? What was her name? Roma—romama?”  
  
“Oh  _yes,_ ” the Master pretended to suddenly remember, “Romanadvorewundebar?”  
  
“Romanadvoratrelundar was not my ‘date,’” Braxiatel corrected them hastily.   
  
“Oh, then everything should be just fine!” the Doctor said.  
  
“What?” Braxiatel set his mojito down suddenly.   
  
“Well since both of us have been granted amnesty and the Empire has been officially recognized by Gallifrey now, we thought we might celebrate by opening a University. Really, it’s high time someone other than Gallifrey facilitated technological development in the universe.   
  
“Your Romambo seemed interested in spending some time on Hestin, given that our new institution would, naturally, be free of some of the dogma and restrictions that plague Gallifreyan academic life. Young as she is, with that  _triple first,_  we thought we might offer her an associate professorship right off the bat.”  
  
“Provided you don’t mind,” the Master cut in, looking politely unconcerned.   
  
“But if she was only accompanying you as a friend, or a protégé, we’d feel within our rights to formally ask,” the Doctor finished.   
  
Irving Braxiatel, who minded a great deal and had no intention of letting them know it, took a sullen sip of his mojito, momentarily dropping out of the technical conversation that arose from the mention of scientific studies banned on Gallifrey. Brax wished the universe, in all its vastness, had been large enough to contain his brother and the Master’s discrete parallel lives, rather than conspiring to throw them into each others' paths. It could, he thought as he watched the two of them fawn revoltingly over each other, each acting as though the other’s opinion on gravity-well engines was the most brilliant and sexually appealing thing he had ever heard, only end badly.   
  
  
the end


End file.
